Faculty member Emily Clem has a new paper “The expression of time in Amahuaca switch-reference clauses” that just appeared in the open access journal Languages as part of a special issue called “Current Studies on Morpho-Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics: A View from the South American Lowlands and Beyond”. This paper offers a comparison of how degrees of temporal remoteness are expressed in main vs. dependent clauses in Amahuaca (Panoan; Peru), showing that in adjunct clauses markers of temporal remoteness can result in similar kinds of ambiguities that are found with tense markers in other languages.

Faculty member Sharon Rose, alumnus Michael Obiri-Yeboah (PhD 2021, currently Assistant Teaching Professor in Linguistics Department at Georgetown University) and Sarah C. Creel (faculty member in UC San Diego Cognitive Science)  just published the paper “Perception of ATR contrasts by Akan speakers: a case of perceptual near-merger.” in Laboratory Phonology. The paper shows how Akan speakers can easily distinguish vowels contrasted by only Advanced Tongue Root, but have difficulty perceiving phonemic vowel contrasts that differ by both Advanced Tongue Root and height features; although such vowels have distinct articulation, they are acoustically similar.

Alumna Qi Cheng (Ph.D. 2020, currently assistant professor in the linguistics department at the University of Washington), faculty member Rachel Mayberry, Eric Halgren and Austin Roth (both at UC San Diego), and Denise Klein and Jen-Kai Chen (both at the Montreal Neurological Institute, MNI) just published the paper “Restricted language access during childhood affects adult brain structure in selective language regions” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Vol. 120(7). The paper shows effects of the childhood language environment on grey matter development in language relevant regions in the adult brain. These findings show that the growing brain needs linguistic stimulation for the brain-language system to fully develop.

Faculty member Emily Clem has two new papers. The first is entitled “Accounting for parallels between inverse marking and the PCC” and is published in the proceedings of NELS 52. The second is entitled “Attitude reports without complementation: The case of Amahuaca” and is published in the proceedings of SALT 32.

San Diego Linguistics Papers 12 has been published. It contains the paper “The second generation of “New Shanghainese”: their language and identity” by Shihong Weng. It is available here: http://grammar.ucsd.edu/sdlp/current.html

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.

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.

Graduate student Duk-Ho Jung and faculty member Grant Goodall have a new publication in Journal of Linguistics entitled “Filler–gap dependencies and the remnant–correlate dependency in backward sprouting: Sensitivity to distance and islands.” It is available open-access at https://www.doi.org/10.1017/S0022226722000366

The article examines “backward sprouting” (Although it is unclear what, Mary was drinking on the bus). Superficially, this structure looks very similar to filler-gap dependencies (It is unclear what Mary was drinking __ on the bus), but the article shows experimentally that there are actually some intriguing differences, with important implications for how sprouting structures are formed. The experiments in this article are part of Duk-Ho’s work for his forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation.

Faculty member Marc Garellek has a new publication in Journal of Phonetics, entitled “Theoretical achievements of phonetics in the 21st century: Phonetics of voice quality”: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2022.101155.

The paper reviews the developments in the phonetic study of voice quality over the last twenty years, and includes discussion of some of the research done by Marc Garellek and graduate students in the department.

Graduate student Ebru Evcen and the former faculty member Eva Wittenberg published the paper “Making Question under Discussion explicit shifts counterfactual interpretation” in Proceedings of the 44^th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Using eye-tracking data, the paper shows that comprehenders have tough time to think about the real world hearing a counterfactual utterance (e.g., If there had been zebras, then there would have been lions in the zoo) in general, but the absence of causal connection and well-defined QuD makes it even harder!

Ebru is presenting the paper in a short talk format (virtually) at the Annual Meeting of Cognitive Science Society (CogSci2022), which is held in Toronto, Canada on July 27-30, 2022.

Evcen, E., & Wittenberg, E. (2022). Making the Question Under Discussion explicit shifts counterfactual interpretation. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 44. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/43z0w42j