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 […]

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The direct object relation is a relation of central importance in syntactic theory and so it was an important moment when the nature of that relation was re-thought in a fundamental way in work of the 1990's. This paper examines some of the issues raised in that re-thinking, by looking closely at the expression of […]

Abstract: In Szabolcsi (2010: Ch 12.5) and subsequent work I embarked on a program to investigate the compositional semantics of quantifier words. Taking apart someone and everyone and specifying what the quantifier particles and the indeterminate pronoun mean are not daunting tasks. The interesting part of the project begins when we observe that in many […]

Abstract: One (often implicit) motivation for a linguistic knowledge representation (e.g., a set of linguistic parameters or constraints) comes from an argument from acquisition, where language acquisition is assumed to be straightforward if children’s hypothesis space is defined by the correct knowledge representation. Acquisition then becomes the process of selecting the correct language-specific grammar from […]

Built into the grammatical architecture of any language we find constraints on possible structures. The processing system that uses these structures appears to have inherent preferences in how we interpret them. By looking at a domain where there exists tension between what constraint a learner might expect their language to conform to and the interpretations […]

Abstract: This talk considers the typology of word-headedness in languages with iterative stress and discusses a traditional classification of such systems—top-down vs. bottom-up (Hayes 1995)—in the context of Harmonic Serialism (McCarthy 2010). In some languages the primary stress is autonomous, having properties that are different from those of its secondary stresses, which has been used […]

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 […]

Sun-Ah Jun is Professor of Linguistics at UC Los Angeles. Abstract: In a sentence such as Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony, it is ambiguous whether the relative clause (RC) modifies NP1 the servant (i.e., high attachment) or NP2 the actress (low attachment). Although the details of attachment preference […]

Abstract: In this talk, I investigate the syntactic structure of voice, focusing on noncanonical passives; I build on previous work by myself and others showing that voice is encoded in a functional projection, VoiceP, which is distinct from, and higher than, vP.  I demonstrate that microvariation in the properties of VoiceP explains a wide range of noncanonical passives, […]