Emily Davis presented at the Linguistic Society of America, 2023 Annual meeting

Graduate student Emily Davis presented both a talk and a poster at the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting 2023 in Denver, which was held January 5-8, 2023. The title of the talk was “Multiple center-embedding is more common in verb-final languages” and the abstract can be seen here. The poster was entitled “Learnability and emergence of dependency structures in an artificial language”, the abstract can be seen here, while the poster is below.

Michelle Yuan has a new article in Language

Faculty member Michelle Yuan has a new paper in Language:

Yuan, Michelle. 2022. Ergativity and object movement across Inuit. Language 98(3): 510-551. doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.0.0270

Abstract:

Although the Inuit language is generally characterized as ergative, it has been observed that the ergative case patterning is relatively weaker in certain Eastern Canadian varieties, resulting in a more accusative appearance (e.g. Johns 2001, 2006, Carrier 2017). This article presents a systematic comparison of ergativity in three Inuit varieties, as a lens into the properties of case alignment and clause structure in Inuit more broadly. Building on the previous insight that ergativity in Inuit is tied to object movement to a structurally high position (Bittner 1994, Bittner & Hale 1996a,b, Woolford 2017), I demonstrate that the relative robustness of the ergative patterning across Inuit is tightly correlated with the permissibility of object movement—and not determined by the morphosyntactic properties of ERG subjects, which are uniform across Inuit. I additionally relate this correlation to another point of variation across Inuit concerning the status of object agreement as affixes vs. pronominal clitics (Yuan 2021). These connections offer testable predictions for the status of ergativity across the entire Inuit dialect continuum and yield crosslinguistic implications for the typology of case alignment, especially in how it interacts with the syntactic position of nominals.

 

Yuan Chai and Marc Garellek have a new publication in JASA

Alumna Yuan Chai (Ph.D. 2022) and faculty member Marc Garellek have a new publication in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America entitled “On H1–H2 as an acoustic measure of linguistic phonation type”: https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0014175.

This paper, which is part of a special issue in JASA called “Reconsidering Classic Ideas in Speech Communication,” revisits the use of the acoustic measure H1–H2 for characterizing phonation types, and proposes a new measure that is argued to be better for measuring creaky voice in particular.

UCSD presentations at the Workshop on Model Theoretic Representations in Phonology

Three UCSD linguists will be presenting work at the upcoming Workshop on Model Theoretic Representations in Phonology at Stony Brook University (Sept. 22-24):

  • Postdoctoral researcher Eric Meinhardt will be giving a tutorial entitled “SMT solvers as a research tool for phonology”
  • Graduate student Olivia Griffin will be giving a talk entitled “Computational Complexity and Iconic Functions of Morphophonological Processes” (a collaboration with Jia He Sun, Queen’s University)
  • Faculty member Eric Baković will be participating in a panel discussion (with Karthik Durvasula, MSU; Adam Jardine, Rutgers; and Kristine Yu, UMass)

The workshop will take place in a hybrid format, and is free for all to register and attend.