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X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu
X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Department of Linguistics - UCLA
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TZID:America/Los_Angeles
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250305T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250305T140000
DTSTAMP:20250219T231843Z
CREATED:20250219T231843Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250219T231843Z
UID:621602-1741176000-1741183200@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Dave Cayado
DESCRIPTION:Colloquium Talk – Dave Cayado \nMar 5 @ 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm \nLocation: La Kretz Hall 120
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-dave-cayado/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250307T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250307T140000
DTSTAMP:20250227T231602Z
CREATED:20240815T163627Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250227T231602Z
UID:439911-1741345200-1741356000@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Uriel Cohen Priva
DESCRIPTION:Four short investigations of short duration.\n\nI will present four interconnected investigations regarding the effects of short duration in the context of phonetics\, phonology and sound change. I’ll start with the observation that durational shortening appears to be a crucial causal factor in at least three unrelated languages (Ennever\, Meakins\, and Round 2017; Katz and Pitzanti 2019; Cohen Priva and Gleason 2020). I will argue that this causal route saves us from seemingly counter-optimization in information-driven consonant lenition (e.g. Cohen Priva 2017). Turning our attention to vowels\, I will demonstrate that contrast-elimination pressures on vowels would not result in a schwa\, but rather in a high central vowel\, and that the abundance of schwa vowels cross-linguistically would seem to follow from the loss of a perceived target alongside the maintenance of the need for a vowel (Cohen Priva and Strand 2023). Finally\, I will delve into individual differences in the degree to which speakers yield to phonetic pressures\, which turns out to be good for explaining the absence of unwarranted sound change (Cohen Priva and Gafter 2024).
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-uriel-cohen-priva/
LOCATION:Royce Hall 156
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250310T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250310T140000
DTSTAMP:20250219T232119Z
CREATED:20250219T232119Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250219T232119Z
UID:621614-1741608000-1741615200@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Kelsey Sasaki
DESCRIPTION:Colloquium Talk – Kelsey Sasaki \nMar 10 @ 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm \nLocation: La Kretz Hall 120
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-kelsey-sasaki/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250312T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250312T140000
DTSTAMP:20250219T232356Z
CREATED:20250219T232356Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250219T232356Z
UID:621616-1741780800-1741788000@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Jack Duff
DESCRIPTION:Colloquium Talk – Jack Duff \nMar 12 @ 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm \nLocation: La Kretz Hall 120
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-jack-duff/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250314T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250314T140000
DTSTAMP:20250304T175151Z
CREATED:20240815T163603Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250304T175151Z
UID:439912-1741950000-1741960800@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Florian Schwarz
DESCRIPTION:Testing weak and strong definites experimentally across languages \nSchwarz (2009) proposed a distinction between weak and strong definite articles\, reflected in Standard German in the presence or absence of contraction of the article with certain prepositions (e.g.\, vom vs. von dem). Semantically\, the analysis took the former to be a situationally restricted uniqueness article\, and the latter an anaphoric article bearing an index\, just like a pronoun. In subsequent work\, numerous authors have applied this distinction to analyze contrasts between definite forms in a wide range of languages. While this cross-linguistic evidence supports the availability of the ingredients of the distinction in natural language in general (with some analytical variations and adjustments\, and quite possibly further aspects in play in certain languages)\, the basic semantic contrast remains subtle and has generally not been captured systematically in experimental investigations. I present data from a simple picture selection task paradigm where the contrast in anaphoricity is pitched against another factor\, that of typicality\, which do provide quantitative support of the posited contrast. Next\, I extend this paradigm to English to turn to a question vexingly left open in this literature\, namely whether articles in languages that do not seem to make such a contrast and only use one form for definites throughout\, like English\, are ambiguous or map onto either weak or strong articles. The final part of the talk adds in data from various ongoing collaborations that investigate yet more languages to work towards a more systematic and quantitative comparison of different forms across languages. I close by considering challenges that lie ahead in integrating this data theoretically. \nLocation: Royce Hall\, Room 156
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-florian-schwarz/
LOCATION:Royce Hall 156
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250411T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250411T140000
DTSTAMP:20250402T183042Z
CREATED:20240815T163542Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250402T183042Z
UID:439913-1744369200-1744380000@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Ginny Dawson
DESCRIPTION:Rethinking classifier languages\n\nClassifier languages have long been of interest to formal semanticists. That such languages do not allow nouns to be modified directly by numerals have lead researchers to propose a significant degree of cross-linguistic variation between classifier and non-classifier languages in either noun meaning (e.g. Chierchia 1998) or numeral meaning (e.g. Krifka 1989\, Bale & Coon 2014). Classifier languages\, on this view\, show fundamental semantic differences from non-classifier languages. In this talk\, I challenge this notion by examining the behavior of nouns and numerals in Tiwa\, a Tibeto-Burman language of India. I argue that despite having the properties of a typical classifier language\, nouns and numerals in Tiwa can and should be analyzed as having the same sorts of meanings as nouns and numerals in non-classifier languages like English. I argue that the differences between languages like Tiwa and English are largely morphosyntactic\, and that this morphosyntactic variation is expected given standard assumptions about the syntax and semantics of nouns\, numerals\, and number marking. Most centrally\, I argue that (sortal) classifiers in Tiwa are overt realizations of a morpheme that creates a predicate out of a degree-denoting numeral; a function which is often assumed to be a type-shift in languages like English (Bylinina & Nouwen 2020). What seem like major differences between the two languages\, then\, does not reflect fundamental semantic variation in noun or numeral meaning\, but is exactly the sort of morphosyntactic variation we expect to see. I conclude by looking at the typological picture more broadly\, examining the ways languages are predicted to differ based on the dimensions of variation I identify. \nLocation: Royce Hall 362
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-ginny-dawson/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250425T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250425T140000
DTSTAMP:20250410T165813Z
CREATED:20240815T163518Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250410T165813Z
UID:439914-1745578800-1745589600@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Tanya Bondarenko
DESCRIPTION:Lessons about clausal embedding from long-distance wh-dependencies  \nAbstract: In this talk I argue with the data from Georgian that syntax and semantics of long-distance wh-dependencies provide support for the view that many embedded clauses are adjuncts (syntactically) and modifiers (semantically) rather than arguments of verbs they combine with (Elliott 2017\, Bochnak & Hanink 2021\, Bondarenko 2022\, a.o.). Georgian is a language that has wh-movement within matrix clauses (Borise 2023)\, but lacks wh-movement out of embedded CPs (Harris 1981). I examine in detail both restrictions on wh-movement\, and alternative strategies of building long-distance wh-dependencies\, and argue that explanations for both need the assumption that embedded clauses at hand are not true arguments of the verb. \nFirst\, I argue that restrictions on wh-movement in Georgian are an instance of the Williams Cycle effect (Williams\, 2003\, 2011; Meadows 2023\, Poole 2023\, Egressy 2024\, a.o.): unlike in languages like English\, wh-movement in Georgian targets a syntactic projection lower than CP\, and this is why it cannot cross a CP boundary. I show that this constraint is part of a broader seize-locality generalization\, and propose that Meadows’ (2023) approach to Williams Cycle is best suited to account for it. An implication of this is that (most) embedded clauses have to be adjuncts: a crucial part of the proposal is that clausal embedding involves featurally free instances of external Merge. \nSecond\, I show that Georgian has three alternative strategies of building long-distance wh-dependencies (wh-scope marking\, prolepsis with a gap\, prolepsis with wh-doubling)\, and none of them involve cross-clausal movement (cf. Dayal 1994\, 2000\, a.o.). I make a proposal of how to build the meanings of these long-distance questions compositionally from clauses with regular wh-syntax. A crucial assumption of this proposal is that embedded clauses restrict the propositional content of the matrix eventuality\, implying that embedded clauses under consideration are modifiers of the verb. \n  \nLocation: Royce Hall 362
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-tanya-bondarenko/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250502T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250502T140000
DTSTAMP:20250423T161149Z
CREATED:20240815T163802Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250423T161149Z
UID:439921-1746183600-1746194400@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Rachel Walker
DESCRIPTION:Position-sensitive transparency in vowel harmony: The role of prosodic gestures and locality \nA recent crosslinguistic study of positional privilege in vowel harmony observed that vowels in a stressed syllable may asymmetrically block harmony\, but they are never singled out to be transparent (Kaplan & Walker 2024). This typological gap is not predicted under traditional theoretical assumptions in Optimality Theory. If transparent vowels are skipped by harmony\, then a pattern is predicted in which harmony operates among unstressed vowels but skips stressed vowels to preserve content in the stressed syllable. This unwanted pattern is derived when a positional faithfulness constraint designated for the stressed syllable (Beckman 1999) and a harmony imperative constraint are enforced at the cost of the constraint that penalizes vowels that are skipped by harmony: ˈσ-Faithfulness >> Harmony Imperative >> *Skip. \nThis talk employs the representations of gestural phonology (Browman & Goldstein 1986\, 1995) to address this unwanted prediction\, centering on two points. First\, harmony does not actually skip vowels\, so transparent vowels have overlapping (co-active) opposing gestures. “Transparency” results when the goal state of the harmonizing gesture is not achieved due to blending with a co-active opposing gesture (Gafos & Benus 2006\, Smith 2018). Second\, stressed vowels resist transparency because they are a locus of hyperarticulation due to a prosodic µ-gesture associated with stress (Saltzman et al. 2008\, Katsika & Tsai 2021)\, a context that disfavors opposing gestures. \nAn analysis is developed in Optimality Theory. The proposal is illustrated in application to vowel laxing/RTR harmony in the Eastern Andalusian Spanish variety of Granada (Jiménez & Lloret 2007\, 2020\, Lloret & Jiménez 2009)\, in which unstressed vowels may be transparent but stressed vowels consistently harmonize. In addition to empirically demonstrating issues surrounding positional asymmetries in vowel harmony\, three patterns of variation in the harmony pattern of Eastern Andalusian Spanish are examined and analyzed in the gestural account. \nThis study has implications for phonological representations\, locality\, and position-sensitive constraints. Building on previous gestural approaches to harmony\, it provides a new argument for understanding spreading in harmony as a local operation\, and it offers support for gestural representations in phonology through examining interactions of vocal tract constriction gestures and prosodic gestures. In terms of the treatment of privileged positions\, it argues that stress-sensitive transparency and blocking be understood as an effect of positional markedness rather than positional faithfulness\, contributing a new argument to work identifying disadvantages of positional faithfulness in handling various aspects of positional privilege (e.g. Hayes 2004\, Prince & Tesar 2004\, Jesney 2009). \nLocation: Royce Hall 362
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-rachel-walker/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250516T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250516T140000
DTSTAMP:20250429T154427Z
CREATED:20240815T163721Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250429T154427Z
UID:439909-1747393200-1747404000@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Matt Wagers
DESCRIPTION:Setting healthy (mnemonic) boundaries\nSome 20 years ago\, Lewis & Vasishth (2005) applied the ACT-R modeling framework to language processing by creating an English parser fragment embedded in an associative memory. McElree (2000) and McElree\, Foraker & Dyer (2003) informed this development by providing earlier arguments in favor of such a content-addressable memory. This proved to be hugely influential because it offered a general theory of dependency resolution which could be made precise by reference to any particular theory of linguistic features. Both strands of thought reoriented thinking in the field away from models of working memory that required serial search procedures and\, generally\, the discovery of widespread interference effects has vindicated that shift.Much recent research has made progress in delineating what the representations are (Yadav et al. 2023\, Keshev et al. 2025) and how they can be learned in an unsupervised manner (Ryu & Lewis\, 2021). Relatively unexplored is how to characterize the information that can be attended to simultaneously\, sometimes called the “focus of attention” (Oberauer & Hein\, 2012). This is an important commitment of models like ACT-R and provides an attractive point of articulation to theories of locality or linguistic domains. In this talk\, I will survey what we know\, and don’t know\, about the focus of attention in language processing (Wagers & McElree\, 2013\, 2022) and relate it to recent thinking about the dynamics of context encoding (Healey\, Long & Kahana\, 2019; Balachandran\, Wagers & Rich\, 2025). \nLocation: Royce Hall 362
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-matt-wagers/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250523T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250523T140000
DTSTAMP:20250516T234156Z
CREATED:20240815T163257Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250516T234156Z
UID:439907-1747998000-1748008800@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Valentine Hacquard
DESCRIPTION:Being pragmatic about anankastic conditionals (joint work with Jingyi Chen) \nSo-called ‘anankastic conditionals’\, like (1)\, have vexed standard accounts of modals and conditionals\, by presenting an apparent non compositionality problem. Indeed\, (1) seems to express that going to Harlem requires taking the A train\, rather than the mere desire to do so\, a reading standard accounts can’t derive. This has led to proposals for a special semantics for want (Condoravdi & Lauer 2016) or a special semantics for conditionals involving goal-oriented modality (von Fintel & Iatridou 2005). \n(1) If you want to go to Harlem\, you have to take the A train. \nIn this talk\, I will show that the apparent non-compositionality problem of anankastic conditionals is more general\, and can be replicated with attitude verbs other than want\, and across modal flavors: all can trigger what we call “harmonizing readings”. We offer a pragmatic account that generalizes across modal flavors and attitudes. Specifically\, we argue that harmonizing arises when the meaning of the antecedent gives rise to a defeasible modal inference that matches in flavor with the consequent modal. This account predicts when harmonizing is possible\, and when it isn’t\, without relying on any flavor specific idiosyncrasies. \nLocation: Royce Hall 362
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-valentine-hacquard/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
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