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.
Author Archives: Linguistics Department
Alex Rodriguez and Grant Goodall at CAMP[5]
Graduate student Alex Rodriguez and faculty member Grant Goodall are presenting on Clitic Left Dislocation in Spanish: Island sensitivity without gaps at CAMP[5] (5th California Meeting on Psycholinguistics ), which will be held at UCLA on January 28-29, 2023.
Ivano Caponigro becomes an associate editor for “Linguistics and Philosophy”
Faculty member Ivano Caponigro has just accepted the invitation to join the editorial team of the journal “Linguistics and Philosophy” as an associate editor.
Emily Clem has new papers in the proceedings of NELS 52 and SALT 32
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
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
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.
Ivano Caponigro presented at the Amsterdam Colloquium 2022
Faculty member Ivano Caponigro and Anamaria Fălăuş (CNRS, Nantes) gave a talk at the Amsterdam Colloquium 2022, which was held in Amsterdam on December 19-21, 2022. The title of their presentation was “The semantics of Rudin constructions in Romanian”. The paper is available here.
Michelle Yuan is an invited speaker at WSCLA 26
Faculty member Michelle Yuan is one of the invited speakers at the 26th Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas, to take place at McGill University on April 28-30, 2023.
Ivano Caponigro is an invited speaker at SALT 33
Faculty member Ivano Caponigro is an invited speakers at the 33rd meeting of the annual conference Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 33), which is organized at Yale University on May 12-14, 2023.
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.