Grant Goodall: "Grammar and working memory: How experimental syntax can help us tell the difference" The use of formal experiments to measure sentence acceptability, known as “experimental syntax”, is able to capture many fine-grained grammatical contrasts, but it also captures effects that have long been thought to be extra-grammatical, such as those induced by increased […]

The Linguistics Department's annual Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) will be held Friday, May 29th, from 12:45 - 4:45pm in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. The Distinguished Alumnus speaker will be Aaron White (2008), who is a fifth year PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland. We hope you will attend.   12:45 p.m. Refreshments 12:55 […]

Abstract: In studying linguistic knowledge and the cognitive processing that uses this knowledge, linguists and psycholinguists have looked for ways to find out what is cognitively "real" that underlies the patterns found in language and linguistic behavior. We are generally faced with the problem of being on the outside looking in. Each method of acquiring […]

Linguistic Colloquium: The Linguistic department hosts colloquium talks by distinguished faculty from around the world. Fall 2015 October 9th: Keith Johnson, UC Berkeley October 16th: Heidi Harley, University of Arizona October 30th: Ivano Caponigro, UC San Diego November 20th: Elliott Moreton, University of North Carolina Winter 2016 January 15th: Sharon Inkelas, UC Berkeley February 5th: Colin Phillips, University of Maryland February […]

Heidi Harley, University of Arizona "Suppressing Subject Arguments in Hiaki" The Hiaki passive suffix -wa appears in a very normal-looking personal passive, and also in an odd impersonal passive—odd in that it is productive with unaccusative as well as unergative intransitive predicates, provided they have a argument. It appears that -wa can even make a personal passive out of a raising […]

Linguistic Colloquium: Free-Choice Free Relative Clauses in Italian and Romanian   English, Italian, and Romanian (and many other languages) allow for standard free relative clauses, i.e., non-interrogative wh-clauses with the same distribution and interpretation as definite DPs or PPs (e.g. Elena goes ). The same three languages (and many others) also allow for a kind of free relative in which […]

Abstract: What properties are shared by the processes used for learning linguistic and non-linguistic patterns? What properties are different? Research on non-linguistic (mainly visual) pattern learning has found distinct implicit and explicit processes which have different computational architectures, are facilitated by different experimental conditions, and differ in sensitivity to different pattern types. Is the same […]

This talk, based on joint work with Tara McAllister Byun and Yvan Rose, addresses a phenomenon of longstanding interest: the existence of child-specific phonological patterns which are not attested in adult language. We propose a new theoretical approach, termed the A(rticulatory)-Map model, to account for the origin and elimination of child-specific phonological patterns. Due to […]

We speak and understand the same language, but it’s generally assumed that language production and comprehension are subserved by separate cognitive systems. So they must presumably draw on a third, task-neutral cognitive system (“grammar”). So comprehension-production differences are a thorn in the side of anybody who might want to collapse grammar and language processing mechanisms […]

Every year towards the end of the Winter Quarter, the Linguistics at Santa Cruz conference showcases the research of second and third year graduate students. This conference coincides with a visit to campus of prospective graduate students, and it always features as an invited speaker, a Ph.D. alum of the department. This year's invited speaker […]