Lx News

The Newsletter of the UCLA Linguistics Dept.
October, 1996

A Computer on Every Desk?
Lx Classes on the Web
Fromkin Elected to NAS
Conference Report: AFLA III
Grants, Fellowships, and Awards
Recent and Forthcoming Publications
In Other News...(Short notices concerning people in our dept.)
African Languages Web Page
The Rain in Spain? Report from the Girona Int'l. Summer School in Linguistics
Recent and Forthcoming Talks and Poster
Schedules: Colloquium and Seminars Visiting Faculty

A Computer on Every Desk?

Some of the department's grad students may have noticed a new addition to their offices. Unfortunately, it's not windows or skylights. Fortunately, it is something just as good, if not better.

Each graduate student office is now equipped with at least one new computer. The recent additions are all part of Tim Stowell's plan to put a computer on every student desk. This summer, the Department purchased eight new computers exclusively for student use and distributed the machines throughout student offices.

The decisions about what to purchase were not easy. First of all, the Department had to purchase equipment that would get used. Secondly, a decision had to be made about how to get the Department the most for its money. After much research and price comparison, the Department finally purchased six PowerPC MAC Performas and two 133 mhz Pentium PC's. All of the computers have color monitors, 1 gb hard drives and CD-ROM drives.

Tim has also recognized that just computers aren't enough. Most students had been using the Computer Room to check e-mail and to print documents. Thus, the Department has made it a policy to connect all new machines to HUMNET. Additionally, the Department purchased a HP post-script printer in June.

Tim is hoping that the new equipment will encourage students to spend more time at the Department. If students have greater access to the equipment they need, perhaps they will use their offices more and be around the Department more.

Lx Classes on the WEB

Russ Schuh has created a World Wide Web page for Linguistics 110 and is in the process of creating one for his Linguistics 1 offering in Winter 1997. Planned for these pages is information on the course (course outline, etc.) and late breaking news on the course, such as changes in office hours, information about assignments and anything else relevant to the course.

Eventually, Russ hopes to establish "electronic office hours" following a model used by the Chemistry Department. The address for Lx 110 is:

The course can also be accessed through a page that Humanities Computing has set up for course information:

Fromkin Elected to NAS

This Spring, Vicki Fromkin was among sixty scientists elected to the National Academy of Sciences. (Vicki is known to the Academy as Dr. Victoria A. Fromkin.) The Academy annually elects a small number of scientists, chosen by Academy members for their distinguished careers as well as their commitment to research. Membership in the National Academy of Sciences is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded an American scientist.

Vicki has received many honors and appointments throughout her career. At UCLA, she has served as the vice chancellor of graduate programs and was also Dean of the Graduate Division. Additionally, she has served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America and chair of the Board of Governors of the Academy of Aphasia. The UCLA community has presented Vicki with Harvey L. Eby Award for the Art of Teaching and the UCLA Alumni Association's Professional Achievement Award in recognition of her commitment to education and research. Currently, Vicki is a member of the executive board of the Permanent International Committee of Linguists.

Vicki's research in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics has been internationally recognized. Predominantly, she has concentrated on collecting and analyzing data from speech errors and slips of the tongue produced spontaneously in normal conversation and by brain-damaged patients. She has used her findings in the development of a model of the mental representation of language and its use in speech production and comprehension.

The Department is extremely proud of Vicki and her latest achievement. Vicki exemplifies both the caliber of faculty at the Department and the achievements of which Department alumnae are capable. Her election to the National Academy of Sciences furthers her efforts to solidify Linguistics as a science as well as to establish a position for women in science. The Department is honored to have the continued presence of a scholar such as Vicki and applauds her continued research and her many contributions to the field.

AFLA III

On the last weekend in April 1996, UCLA hosted the third annual meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association, or AFLA III. Invited speakers included Diana Archangeli, Abigail Cohn, Sandy Chung and Lisa Travis, as well as our own Ian Maddieson and Ed Keenan. Around 40 speakers, including a few UCLA students, gave talks on the phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics of Austronesian languages. Ed Keenan and Carol Archie hosted a party at their new house near UCLA, where a good time was had by all. UCLA plans to host AFLA IV in Spring 1997.

Grants, Fellowships, and Awards

The following individuals received Dissertation Year Fellowships for the 1996- 97 Academic Year:

• Manuel Espanol-Echevarria
• Felicia Lee
• Peggy MacEachern
• Brian Potter
• Kim Thomas

Felicia Lee also received a UCLA Institute of American Cultures/Chicano Studies Research Center grant for 1996-97. She received this grant for her work on Zapotec.

Misha Becker received the Cog Sci Research Training Grant sponsored through the Psych Department. The grant will start in Winter Quarter 1997.

This year Brian Potter also received the UCLA Institute of American Cultures Graduate Fellowship, which he declined in order to accept the Dissertation Year Fellowship. Last year, Brian received two research grants: the American Philosophical Society Research Grant for Native American Studies and the UCLA Institute of American Cultures (& American Indian Studies Center) Research Grant.

Recent and Forthcoming Publications

Recent Publications:

• Fougeron, Cecile and Sun-Ah Jun. 1995. "Properties of French intonation at fast speech rate". In Proceedings of XIIIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Vol. 3:488-491. Stockholm, Sweden.
• Hayes, Bruce, and Margaret MacEachern. 1996. "Are there lines in folk verse?" UCLA Working Papers in Phonology 1.
• Hsu, Chai-Shune. 1996. "A Phonetically-based Optimality-Theoretic Account of Consonant Reduction in Taiwanese." In UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 92: 1-44.
• Hsu, Chai-Shune. 1996. Account of Consonant Reduction in Taiwanese." In UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 92: 1-44.
• Jun, Sun-Ah. 1995. "Asymmetrical prosodic effects on the laryngeal gesture in Korean" in B. Connell and A. Arvaniti (eds.) Phonology and phonetic evidence: Papers in Laboratory Phonology IV: 235-253, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (An earlier version is in Working Papers in Linguistics 44, Dept. of Linguistics, The Ohio State University)
• Jun, Sun-Ah. 1996. The Phonetics and Phonology of Korean Prosody: intonational phonology and prosodic structure. New York, NY: Garland Publishing Inc.
• Jun, Sun-Ah. 1996. "Influence of microprosody on macroprosody: a case of phrase initial strengthening". In UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 92: 97-116.
• Jun, Sun-Ah and Cecile Fougeron. 1995. "The accentual phrase and the Prosodic structure of French". In Proceedings of XIIIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Vol. 2: 722-725. Stockholm, Sweden.
• Jun, Sun-Ah and Mira Oh. 1996. "Prosodic analysis of three types of wh- phrases in Korean". Language and Speech 39(1).
• Ladefoged, Peter and Ian Maddieson. 1996.The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Potter, Brian. 1996. "Cherokee Agentive Nominalizations." in P. Munro (ed.) Cherokee Papers from UCLA. UCLA Occasional Papers in Linguistics, No. 16.
• Potter, Brian. 1996. " Minimalism & the Mirror Principle." In The Proceedings of Nels #? , Boston, 1995.
• Venditti, Jennifer, Sun-Ah Jun and Mary E. Beckman. 1996. "Prosodic cues to syntactic and other linguistic structures in Japanese, Korean, and English" in J. Morgan and K. Demuth (eds.) Signal to Syntax. pp. 287-311, Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., Inc.

Forthcoming Publications

• Fulop, Sean A. "Thematic proto-roles and the semantics of control." To appear in Syntax at Sunset (UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics), Edward Garrett and Felicia Lee, eds., 1996.
• Kural, Murat. "Postverbal Constituents in Turkish and the Linear Correspondence Axiom". To be published as a "Remarks and Replies" paper in Linguistic Inquiry.
• MacEachern, Margaraet. "Laryngeal similarity effects in Quechua and Aymara." To appear in Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics.
• MacEachern, Margaret. "Ordering restrictions on aspirated and ejective stops in Bolivian Aymara." To appear in Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society.
• Oviatt, Sharon, Gina-Anne Levow, Margaret MacEachern, and Karen Kuhn. "Modeling hyperarticulate speech during human-computer error resolution." To appear in Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processes.
• Ways of Scope Taking, edited by Anna Szabolcsi, is to be published this Fall by Kluwer. This volume contains papers by Beghelli, Ben- Shalom, Gutierrez-Rexach, Stabler, Stowell, and Szabolcsi in addition to papers by individuals not from UCLA. This volume represents a joint syntax/semantics/ computational research project in the department.
• UC Press has accepted A Grammar of Miya by Russell G. Schuh for publication. This is a reference grammar of Miya, a Chadic language of northern Nigeria on which Russ did field work in 1982-83. It should be out by summer 1997.

In Other News...

Matt Pearson was hired as a linguistics consultant by Rosecrans Productions (affiliated with SONY), to design an alien language for the NBC TV series "Dark Skies."

Ian Maddieson is spending the fall quarter as a visiting professor at the Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage at Universite Lumiere, Lyon where I will be teaching a course on acoustic phonetics and taking part in seminars on automatic language recognition and universals of phonological change.

Ed Keenan was a Visiting Professor at Paris 7 for two months, May and June. He was a visiting professor for the first two weeks of July at Universitat Tuebingen in Tuebingen.

African Languages Web Page

Professors Russell Schuh of UCLA and Sam Mchombo of UC Berkeley have been recipients of an Intercampus Cooperative Grant from the University of California. The purpose of the grant program is to stimulate cooperation between campuses of the University of California which share certain resources. Schuh and Mchombo's grant is specifically to promote intercampus cooperation in African language teaching and distribution of information on African language research.

An important part of this project with be the creation of a set of World Wide Web pages on African languages, particularly those taught in the UC system. The site for the pages is now located on a server at UCLA.

Schuh has begun the creation of a Hausa Home Page, and pages on other languages are in the offing. The eventual goal will be a set of linked resources on African languages which can be consulted by anyone in the world. The Hausa Home Page can be viewed at:

The Rain in Spain?

A Report from the Girona International Summer School in Linguistics

We were invited to teach at the 1996 Girona International Summer School in Linguistics. Girona is an old city with a new university in Catalonia (northeastern Spain), between Barcelona and France. Classes met an hour a day, 5 days a week, for 4 weeks. There were 3 phonology and 1 phonetics/phonology interface courses total, of which we were 1 phonology (Bruce) and the phonetics (Pat). The students came from the local area as well as from elsewhere in Europe, and from Canada and the US. Most were MA-level linguistics students, but some were undergraduates and some were in language programs, e.g. Catalan studies. The enrollments in phonology were the highest ever at the School, and the phonetics course, which was also well attended, was the first offered. The course was intended to cover about half of the material from our UCLA Linguistics 203, Phonetic Theory. As it turned out, all three phonology courses had significant phonetics components, something that was surprising to the students, most of whom had little prior exposure to phonetics in their own university programs. In response, I tried to pick up on the topics raised in those courses and present helpful background information.

Bruce and I also gave a "ph drinks" party in our apartment, which was in a historic building in the old Jewish quarter. Students seemed very impressed that faculty would do this on their own, and they now think that UCLA must be the friendliest department in linguistics.

Recent and Forthcoming Talks and Poster

Recent Talks and Posters

• Becker, Misha, Nina Hyams and Teun Hoekstra. ÒThe Role of the Specifier and Finiteness in Early Grammar.Ó Presented at the Specifier's Conference in York, England March 21 - 23, 1996.
• Curtiss, Susan, Jeannette Schaeffer, Tetsuya Sano, Jeff MacSwan, and Todd Masilon. "A Grammatical Coding and Analysis System for Language Data from Normal and Brain-Damaged Children." Paper presented at the Joint International Conference of the Association for Literacy and Linguistic Computing and the Association for Computers and the Humanities, University of Bergen, Norway, June 25-29, 1996.
• Fougeron, Cecile and Sun-Ah Jun. "Properties of French intonation at Fast Speech Rate" at the XIIIth meeting of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Aug 1995.
• Garrett, Edward. "On the asymmetry of wh-in-situ interpretation.Ó Presented at the (?th) GLOW Colloquium, Athens, Greece, April 17, 1996.
• Hinnebusch, Tom. "Who are the Swahili." Presented at the 27th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, University of Florida, March 29-31, 1996.
• Hinnebusch, Tom. "Skewing in Lexicostatic Tables as an Indicator of Contact." Presented at the Round Table on Bantu Historical Linguistics. Université Lumieère Lyon 2, Lyon, France. May 30-June 1, 1996.
• Hinnebusch, Tom. "Materials for LCTLs: the Less Commonly Taught Languages Summit Questionnaire and the UCLA Language Materials Database." Presented at the Less Commonly Taught Languages Summit, Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquistion (CARLA), University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Sept 20-21, 1996.
• Hsu, Chai-Shune. ÒA Phonetically-based Optimality Theoretic Account of Stop Lenition in Taiwanese.Ó Presented at the Workshop on Theoretical East Asian Linguistics, UCI, Oct 1995.
• Hsu, Chai-Shune. ÒAerodynamic evidence of pre-consonantal stop lenition in Taiwanese.Ó Poster presented at the 130th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in St. Louis, Nov 1995.
• Hsu, Chai-Shune. ÒVoicing Underspecification in Taiwanese Word-final Consonants.Ó Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America in San Diego, Jan 1996.
• Jun, Sun-Ah. "Influence of microprosody on macroprosody: a case of phrase initial strengthening." Presented at the 5th meeting of the Laboratory Phonology Conference, Evanston, IL, July 1996.
• Jun, Sun-Ah. "An acoustic study of Korean Stress" at the 130th Meeting of the Acoustical Socity of America, St. Louis, Missouri, Nov 1995.
• Jun, Sun-Ah and Cecile Fougeron. "The Accentual Phrase and the Prosodic Strucutre of French." Presented at the XIIIth meeting of the Inernational Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Aug. 1995.
• Lee, Felicia. "Aspect, Negation, and Temporal Polarity in Zapotec". Presented at WCCFL, April 1996.
• Lee, Felicia. "Aspect and the Structure of Tense in Zapotec." Presented at SCIL 8 (Student Conference in Linguistics), April 1996.
• MacEachern, Margaret. "Ordering restrictions on aspirated and ejective stops in Bolivian Aymara," Southwest Optimality Theory Workshop, May 1996.
• McDonough, Joyce and Sun-Ah Jun. "An experimental study of oral and nasal airflow in Korean n/l sequences across various phonological boundaries." Presented at the 5th Meeting of the Laboratory Phonology Conference, Evanston, IL, July 1996.
• Pearson, Matt. "Domain phrases: Topic arguments in Malagasy existentials". Presented at AFLA III (Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association),UCLA, 26-28 April, 1996.
• Potter, Brian. ÒFunctional Subordination in the Western Apache Clause.Ó Athapaskan Languages Conference, Edmonton, 1996.
• Stack, Kelly . ÒThe Development of a Pronominal System in the Absence of a Natural Target LanguageÓ, poster session at the Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research Conference, 1996.
• Stack, Kelly . ÒWeak Drop and the Representation of 2-Handed Signs in ASLÓ, poster session at the Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research Conference, 1996.
• Szabolcsi, Anna. ÒDifferential ScopeÓ. Presented at CSSP (Colloque de syntaxe et semantique), Oct 1995.
• Szabolcsi, Anna. ÒOn Modes of OperationÓ. Presented at the Tenth Amsterdam Colloquium, Dec 1995.
• Zhang, Jie. "The consonantal properties of the unrounded high-mid back vowel / /in Mandarin Chinese". Poster presented at the 131st meeting of the ASA (Acoustical Society of America), Indianapolis, Indiana, May 1996. (Typographic limitations prevent the IPA representation of the vowel from appearing here.)

Forthcoming Talks and Posters

• Fulop, Sean A. and Patricia Keating. ÒPronunciation variability in the switchboard corpus." To be presented at the Third Joint Meeting, Acoustical Society of America, Acoustical Society of Japan. Honolulu, Hawaii, Dec 1996.
• Hsu, Chai-Shune and Sun-Ah Jun. ÒProsodic strengthening in Taiwanese: Syntagmatic or Paradigmatic?Ó Paper to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America in Chicago, Jan, 1997.
• Kural, Murat. ÒTwo Types of Bare Measure PhrasesÓ. To be presented at WECOL 1996
• Kural, Murat. ÒArgumental and Predicative Bare Measure PhrasesÓ. To be presented at ESCOL 1996
• Lee, Felicia. "Verbal Focus and the Thetic/Categorical Distinction." To be presented at WECOL, October 1996.
• Lee, Felicia. "Pseudo-quantification in Possessives." To be presented at MALC (Mid-America Linguistics Conference), November 1996.
• Lee, Felicia. "Focus and the Thetic/Categorical Distinction in Zapotec." To be presented at IV Encuentro Linguistica en el Noroeste, November 1996.
• Lee, Felicia. "The Quantificational Structure of Possessives." To be presented at the LSA Annual Meeting, January 1997.
• Maceachern, Margaret. " Computer modeling of the production of ejectives using aerodynamic and acoustic data." To be presented at the 132nd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Honolulu, Hawaii, Dec. 1996.
• MacEachern, Margaret, and Peter Ladefoged. ÒWari' vowels: an instrumental study of a remarkable inventory." To be presented at the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting, January 1997.
• Pearson, Matt. "Pied-piping into the left periphery: Malagasy as a discourse- configurational language". To be presented at NELS 27, McGillUniversity, 18-20 October, 1996.
• Ueyama, Motoko and Sun-Ah Jun. "Focus Realization of Japanese English and Korean English Intonation" at the 7th Japanese Korean Linguistics conference, Los Angeles, CA, Nov. 9, 1996.

POSTERS

• Cho, Taehong . ÒThe role of variable vowel duration in differentiating stop phonation in Korean". To be presented at the Third Joint Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and the Acoustical Society of Japan (ASJ), Honolulu, Hawaii, Dec. 4, 1996.
• Hsu, Chai-Shune and Sun-Ah Jun. ÒIs Tone Sandhi Group part of the Prosodic Hierarchy in Taiwanese? Ò Poster to be presented at the 132th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Honolulu, Hawaii, Dec., 1996.
• Jun, Sun-Ah and Christina Foreman. "Boundary tones and focus realization in African American English intonation", at the 3rd joint meeting of Acoustical Society of America and the Acoustical Society of Japan, Honolulu, Hawaii, Dec. 6, 1996
• Zhang, Jie. "Variation in degree of nasalization for Mandarin vowels with superimposed rhoticity". To be presented at the 132th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Honolulu, Hawaii, Dec. 1996.

Schedules

Tentative Colloquium Schedule, Fall '96

• Oct. 4, Ken Hale
• Oct. 11, open
• Oct. 18, Jeannette Schaeffer
• Oct. 25, open
• Nov. 1, open
• Nov. 8, James Higginbotham
• Nov. 15, open
• Nov. 22, Michael Kenstowicz
• Dec. 6, Joan Bresnan

Note: Higginbotham's talk will probably be given on Tuesday of that week.

As you can see, there are still several open slots, but we haven't heard back yet from everyone, and there are still a few people I have to invite. As for later in the year, Douglas Pulleyblank and Paul Kiparsky will both be coming in the springtime.