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X-WR-CALNAME:Department of Linguistics - UCLA
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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:20251022T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251022T133000
DTSTAMP:20251007T225114Z
CREATED:20251007T225114Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251007T225114Z
UID:842676-1761134400-1761139800@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Syntax/Semantics Seminar - Sean Walsh
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/syntax-semantics-seminar-sean-walsh/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251020T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251020T175000
DTSTAMP:20251007T232103Z
CREATED:20251007T232103Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251007T232103Z
UID:842702-1760976000-1760982600@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Phonetics Seminar - Ethan Glass
DESCRIPTION:Ethan Glass\, “Acoustic cues and gender identity: Exploring voice quality beyond the binary” practice talk for NWAV53 [practice talk]
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/phonetics-seminar-ethan-glass/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251017T090000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251017T110000
DTSTAMP:20250917T153553Z
CREATED:20250917T153553Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250917T153553Z
UID:823354-1760691600-1760698800@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Faculty Meeting
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/faculty-meeting-119/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251015T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251015T180000
DTSTAMP:20251009T163935Z
CREATED:20251009T163935Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251009T163935Z
UID:844369-1760544000-1760551200@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Psycho/CompLing seminar - Jack Duff
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/psycho-compling-seminar-jack-duff/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251015T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251015T133000
DTSTAMP:20251007T225039Z
CREATED:20251007T225039Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251007T225039Z
UID:842674-1760529600-1760535000@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Syntax/Semantics Seminar - János Egressy
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/syntax-semantics-seminar-janos-egressy/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251014T140000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251014T155000
DTSTAMP:20251007T164446Z
CREATED:20251007T164446Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251007T164446Z
UID:842405-1760450400-1760457000@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Phonology Seminar
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/phonology-seminar-12/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251013T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251013T175000
DTSTAMP:20251007T232002Z
CREATED:20251007T232002Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251007T232002Z
UID:842700-1760371200-1760377800@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Phonetics Seminar - Baichen Du
DESCRIPTION:Baichen Du\, “The co-variance of acoustic cues and lip gestures in the production of the Mandarin sibilant merger”
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/phonetics-seminar-baichen-du/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251008T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251008T133000
DTSTAMP:20251007T224944Z
CREATED:20251007T224944Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251007T224944Z
UID:842672-1759924800-1759930200@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Syntax/Semantics Seminar - Lelia Glass
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/syntax-semantics-seminar-lelia-glass/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251007T140000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251007T155000
DTSTAMP:20251006T214938Z
CREATED:20251006T214652Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251006T214938Z
UID:841641-1759845600-1759852200@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Phonology Seminar - Journal Club
DESCRIPTION:Join us on Tuesday\, 10/7\, for journal club! See this google doc for instructions if you are going to present an article. Check it before deciding on an article! Spectators are very welcome too. (If you’re enrolled in the course but this will be your first time attending the journal club\, you’re welcome to either spectate or present; other enrollees must present.)
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/phonology-seminar-journal-club-14/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251003T090000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251003T110000
DTSTAMP:20250917T152700Z
CREATED:20250917T152700Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250917T152700Z
UID:823341-1759482000-1759489200@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Faculty Meeting
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/faculty-meeting-118/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250926T090000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250926T110000
DTSTAMP:20250917T152319Z
CREATED:20250917T152149Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250917T152319Z
UID:823339-1758877200-1758884400@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Faculty Meeting
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/faculty-meeting-112/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250613T090000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250613T110000
DTSTAMP:20250917T151941Z
CREATED:20250512T153123Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250917T151941Z
UID:700376-1749805200-1749812400@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Faculty Meeting
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/faculty-meeting-117/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250611T090000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250611T160000
DTSTAMP:20250602T223428Z
CREATED:20250602T223428Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250602T223428Z
UID:720903-1749632400-1749657600@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Field Methods Mini Conference
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/field-methods-mini-conference/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250606T090000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250606T110000
DTSTAMP:20250403T170037Z
CREATED:20250210T184717Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250403T170037Z
UID:662764-1749200400-1749207600@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Faculty Meeting
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/copy-of-faculty-meeting/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250604T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250604T133000
DTSTAMP:20250512T185707Z
CREATED:20250512T185707Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250512T185707Z
UID:700537-1749038400-1749043800@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Syn/Sem Talk – Ziv Plotnik
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/syn-sem-talk-ziv-plotnik-2/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250602T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250602T180000
DTSTAMP:20250407T154627Z
CREATED:20250407T154627Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250407T154627Z
UID:666590-1748880000-1748887200@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Phonetics seminar - Jian-Leat Siah
DESCRIPTION:Jian-Leat Siah \n“Perceptibility effects in the typology of repairs: Evidence from perception and artificial grammar learning studies”
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/phonetics-seminar-jian-leat-siah/
LOCATION:Campbell Hall 2122A
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250530T090000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250530T120000
DTSTAMP:20250519T205206Z
CREATED:20250210T184717Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250519T205206Z
UID:662762-1748595600-1748606400@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Faculty Meeting
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/faculty-meeting-114/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250528T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250528T133000
DTSTAMP:20250512T185441Z
CREATED:20250512T185441Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250512T185441Z
UID:700535-1748433600-1748439000@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Syn/Sem Talk – Boram Kim
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/syn-sem-talk-boram-kim/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
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
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250521T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250521T133000
DTSTAMP:20250519T173718Z
CREATED:20250428T175030Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250519T173718Z
UID:687000-1747828800-1747834200@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Syn/Sem Talk – Hilda Koopman
DESCRIPTION:Oblique passives\, Voice\, and PPs \nThis talk builds on work with Tomoko Ishizuka “On the (non-accidental) homophony of -rare in passives and (psv-)potentials: insights from Japanese oblique passives)(2025)”. I will focus on a number of questions we did not address previously. These are centered on locative (adjunct) and instrumental passives\, Voice and PPs. After a quick recap of the basis data\, generalizations\, and analysis\, we address the following questions: \n\nThe syntactic hierarchy for Japanese (basically capturing the order-of- operations in a decompositional bottom- up-syntax\, with surface constituency the output (not the input) of the syntactic derivation)\, locates the thematic subject below instrumentals and locatives\, and is moved to a non thematic subject position above locative and instrumental PPs. This hierarchy is incompatible with Pylkkanen (2008)’s influential proposal. She locates the merge location of (active) Voice/the thematic position of the external argument above high applicatives (which include locative and instrumental DPs in Bantu languages). Her main justification is syntactic.\nThe main question therefore is it can be shown that the thematic subject position is above or below locative and instrumentals.\n\nWe present new empirical evidence in support of our proposal\, drawing on locative and instrumental ’passives’ in Malagasy (Western Austronesian)\, and ciCewa (Bantu).\n\n\nThis will raise further questions about the label Voice\, the nature of Voice\, Applicatives and PPs\, as well as questions of comparative syntax.\nIn the languages we discuss (Malagasy\, Bantu\, Japanese)\, oblique DPs alternate with full PPs; Oblique DPs interact with Voice systems/Case\, but full PPs do not. Finally Oblique DPs and the related full PPs show different distributional properties. Oblique DPs appear in A-positions\, oblique PPs in positions c-commanded by agent/themes/VPs (as seen in ellipsis) at the end of the derivation.\nWhy? Two options depending on the treatment of PPs: not: (i) full PPS are the input of the derivation (as in traditional grammars and phrase structure grammars)\, and the absence of P is accounted for in some way. Incorporation? (This never worked well); yes: (ii) Full PPs are the output of the syntactic derivation (a much more recent approach\, dating back to Kayne\, 1994\, 2000-2010). In such a theory\, oblique DPs are a subpart of full PPs\, and can be ”grown” into a full PP. We will show how the way PPs are formed solves the problem that instrumentals and locatives DPs (oblique DPs) are merged above the external argument\, but when they grow into ”full PPs”\, they are ”demoted” ending up in the c-command domain of the subject (and object)\, i.e below the grammatical subject position.\nFinally\, time permitting we address why some languages allow oblique passives/pseudopassives\, and other languages not\, and construct a (hypothetical) typology of oblique passives\,  based on the data\, and theory we presented.
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/syn-sem-talk-ziv-plotnik/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250519T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250519T180000
DTSTAMP:20250408T234849Z
CREATED:20250407T154448Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250408T234849Z
UID:666588-1747670400-1747677600@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Phonetics Seminar - John McGahay
DESCRIPTION:John McGahay \n“Modeling Vowel System Typology Using Iterated Confusion Minimization”
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/phonetics-seminar-john-mcgahay/
LOCATION:Campbell Hall 2122A
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250516T210000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250516T210000
DTSTAMP:20250512T153005Z
CREATED:20250512T153005Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250512T153005Z
UID:700373-1747429200-1747429200@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Faculty Meeting
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/faculty-meeting-116/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
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:20250514T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250514T133000
DTSTAMP:20250512T185000Z
CREATED:20250428T174905Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250512T185000Z
UID:686998-1747224000-1747229400@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Syn/Sem Talk – Anand Abraham
DESCRIPTION:“Sluicing as Discourse Anaphora” \nSluicing is a phenomenon where a *wh*-phrase is used to stand for the meaning of a whole question. Sluicing is traditionally analyzed as a variety of ellipsis (Chung et al. 1995\, Merchant 2001)\, but significant mismatches are possible between the antecedent of a sluice and the structure that is posited in the ellipsis site. Here I take a different route and argue that sluicing is not ellipsis but discourse anaphora. What a sluice does is ask a question about the identity of a discourse referent. This approach avoids issues of specifying an identity condition\, and I argue that it fits the semantic facts better too.
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/syn-sem-talk-anand-abraham/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250512T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250512T180000
DTSTAMP:20250408T234921Z
CREATED:20250407T154333Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250408T234921Z
UID:666583-1747065600-1747072800@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Phonetics Seminar
DESCRIPTION:ASA poster presentation practice \n\nCoralie Cram (representing A. Boulom\, N. Cuymon\, J. McGahay\, Z. Metzler\, E. Montilla\, V. Shetty\, J-L Siah\, & M. Cychosz)\n\n–  “A systematic review and meta-analysis of the development of coarticulation in child speech” \n\nJahnavi Narkar & Max Meszaros\n\n– “A perceptual explanation for the adaptation of aspirated stops in Indic languages” 
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/phonetics-seminar-4/
LOCATION:Campbell Hall 2122A
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250509T090000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250509T110000
DTSTAMP:20250429T152312Z
CREATED:20250429T152312Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250429T152312Z
UID:687863-1746781200-1746788400@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Faculty Meeting
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/faculty-meeting-115/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250507T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250507T133000
DTSTAMP:20250505T152114Z
CREATED:20250505T152114Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250505T152114Z
UID:693636-1746619200-1746624600@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Syn/Sem Talk – Adrian Brasoveanu
DESCRIPTION:This week’s Syn/Sem features a practice SALT talk by Adrian Brasoveanu (UCSC). \nCounterfactual Interpretation as Search for Coherence (In a Learned Model of the World) \n“Once there was a little boy who lived in a hot country. One day his mother told him to take some cake to his grandmother. She warned him to hold it carefully so it wouldn’t break into crumbs. The little boy put the cake in a leaf under his arm and carried it to his grandmother’s. When he got there\, the cake had crumbled into tiny pieces. His grandmother told him he was a silly boy.” (Stein & Glenn\, 1975) Comprehending this short story as a coherent whole requires us to quickly and seamlessly access our background world knowledge to enrich what is literally said with a range of inferences. For example\, the grandmother calls the boy silly because he should have known (as we all do) that cakes are brittle and they crumble when squeezed under one’s arm. Counterfactually\, **had he carried it on top of his head\, the cake wouldn’t have crumbled.** I propose that\, just as discourse comprehension leverages our world knowledge to make inferences and establish narrative coherence as we construct a mental model of the story\, the work of constructing a hypothetical situation that both satisfies the counter-to-fact antecedent and is otherwise as similar as possible to the actual situation involves a similar search for temporal and causal coherence. I thus follow Thomason\, Ippolito\, Khoo among many others in assuming that we need a historically structured interpretation for counterfactuals going beyond the Stalnaker / Lewis pure similarity account. I go further and show how we can leverage the model of discourse comprehension in Frank et al (2003) to _construct_ the similarity / accessibility relation that is a theoretical primitive in all these accounts (and relegated to the _deus ex machina_ of pragmatics) out of a training sample of 250 temporally ordered situations in a microworld involving two characters Bob and Jilly playing various games. From this specific ‘movie’ of 250 ‘frames’\, we learn a first-order Markov model of how events typically unfold in the microworld. The model (although clearly an oversimplification) is sufficient to both make gradient predictions about counterfactual interpretation and predict processing difficulty profiles for counterfactuals that depend on the size of the gap between the actual situation and the counter-to-fact antecedent\, and therefore on the amount of inference work needed to bridge this gap and establish coherence.
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/syn-sem-talk-adrian-brasoveanu/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250505T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250505T180000
DTSTAMP:20250408T234948Z
CREATED:20250407T154035Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250408T234948Z
UID:666581-1746460800-1746468000@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Phonetics Seminar - Zion Mengesha
DESCRIPTION:Zion Mengesha (Dept. of Anthropology)
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/phonetics-seminar-zion-mengesha/
LOCATION:Campbell Hall 2122A
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
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250430T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250430T133000
DTSTAMP:20250428T174517Z
CREATED:20250428T174517Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250428T174517Z
UID:686956-1746014400-1746019800@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Syn/Sem Talk - Ramiro Caso
DESCRIPTION:A talk by Ramiro Caso\, a philosopher/linguist visiting us from Buenos Aires. \nTowards a dynamic account of deontic modals \nI investigate the semantic and pragmatic behavior of deontic modals from a dynamic perspective. Pragmatically\, deontic modals exhibit complex anchoring patterns that depend both on whose information state and whose preference ordering are taken as relevant\, giving rise to distinct patterns of rejection and disagreement. Moreover\, the assertion of a bare deontic modal sentence carries a performative dimension: upon acceptance\, a new obligation or practical commitment is attributed to the relevant deliberative agent. In the domain of semantics\, reasoning involving defeasible obligations\, contrary-to-duty obligations\, and obligations under epistemic uncertainty\, display distinctive non-classical traits\, calling for a non-monotonic treatment of the entailment relation. I explore the extent to which these phenomena can be accounted for by modeling deontic modals as tests on information states.
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/syn-sem-talk-ramiro-caso/
LOCATION:2122 Campbell Hall
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