Maho publishes in NLLT!

Maho and Grant just published an open-access article in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory entitled "Relative clauses are islands in Japanese: The case of double relatives". Based on Maho's dissertation work, the article presents a new way of thinking about cross-linguistic variation in island phenomena.

No regular lab meetings in Spring quarter

Grant will be teaching a graduate seminar this quarter where we'll all be reading and discussing articles and presenting research in progress. In short, we'll be doing the sorts of things we usually do in lab meetings, so we won't have lab meetings this quarter unless a special need arises. The topic of the seminar is A'-movement, and it is open to everyone, whether you're enrolled or not!

Winter 2025 lab meetings

 Our meetings this quarter will be Fridays 12:00 - 1:30.

January 17

We'll continue our discussion from last quarter on the upcoming article by Shen and Lim in Syntax about extraction from DPs.

January 24

We'll have a special guest presentation at a special time (11:00): 

"Testing language models’ syntactic sensitivity to grammatical constraints: A case study of wanna contraction"

      Kangsan Noh, Korea University

      Sanghoun Song, Korea University

      Eunjeong Oh, Sangmyung University

February 14

Grant will lead a discussion of "Post-experiment number crunching: how to go from raw results to results that you can begin to interpret".

February 22

We'll discuss this recent NLLT article on extraction out of NPs:

Tollan, R., Doroudiani, B. & Heller, D. Effects of uniqueness on extraction from definite NP objects. Nat Lang Linguist Theory (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-024-09643-3

February 29

Practice talks for Open House.

March 7

We'll discuss another recent NLLT article, this time on wh-in-situ:

Jin, D., Yan, H. Reassessing the argument–adjunct asymmetry in wh-in-situ islands in Mandarin: An experimental investigation. Nat Lang Linguist Theory  (2024).  https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-024-09638-0

March 14

After our break last week, we'll return to this recent NLLT article on wh-in-situ:

Jin, D., Yan, H. Reassessing the argument–adjunct asymmetry in wh-in-situ islands in Mandarin: An experimental investigation. Nat Lang Linguist Theory  (2024).  https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-024-09638-0 

Grant named LSA Fellow!

Grant Goodall was named a 2025 Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and was honored at a ceremony in January at the Annual Meeting of the LSA in Philadelphia. You can read the full story here. 

CAMP held at UCSD!

 The 7th California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (CAMP[7]) was held on our campus on Nov. 16-17 and was a great success.

Hugo Pau presenting a poster

Penny Pan presenting a paper

The weather cooperated very nicely.

Fall 2024 lab meetings

 Our lab meetings this quarter will be (generally) Fridays 12:00 - 1:00.

October 11

Grant will do part 1 of a tutorial on "how to do an acceptability experiment", focusing on stimuli creation and counterbalancing.

October 18

Part 2 of "how to do an acceptability experiment", looking at more counterbalancing, pseudo-randomization, and fillers.

October 25

Part 3 of "how to do an acceptability experiment", with the focus this time on using Qualtrics as a platform for running the experiment. 

November 8

For our meeting this week, Hugo will give us a preview of his CAMP poster exploring D-linking in Cantonese.

November 15

No meeting this week. CAMP[7] starts tomorrow!

November 22

Preliminary discussion of Shen & Lim (in press), "Definite DP island effects across dependency types".

Spring 2024 lab meetings

Our meeting times this quarter will be Thursdays 2:00 - 3:30.

April 11
We'll continue our discussion of the Momma & Dillon response that we started looking at last quarter:

Momma, Shota and Dillon, Brian. Discourse Factors Do Not Explain Islands. 

Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4635713 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4635713

April 18

After our excellent discussion last week, we'll continue our "manner-of-speaking" series with the latest reply from Goldberg, Cuneo and Fergus:

Adele E. Goldberg, Nicole Cuneo, Abigail Fergus. Addressing a challenge to the Backgroundedness account of islands, March 25, 2024. https://osf.io/hmc9n/download/?format=pdf

May 2

This week we'll talk about some current work by Jon Sprouse and Sandra Villata on D-linking and strong/weak islands. The slides from a recent talk of theirs are available here .

May 9

We'll continue our discussion of the Sprouse & Villata slides.

May 16

Since we've been talking about D-linking, we'll continue along those lines with this recent WCCFL poster:

Wh-island effects and d-linking effects in wh-in situ questions

Zheng Shen and Beth Chan, WCCFL 2024

Abstract: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p4GO_HZ-IkpJahTket5RfPB-sADY4KeW/view?usp=sharing

Poster: https://drive.google.com/file/d/152oPbmJEwWaNBGRYbQrvFAE3lXihYEFD/view?usp=sharing

May 23

Grant will show us some work in progress that he has been doing on D-linking.

May 30

We'll discuss this poster on Singapore English that Unsub saw at the recent HSP conference:

Islands for wh-extraction and wh-in-situ are backgrounded in Singlish (but not all backgrounded constructions are islands)

https://osf.io/495nr/

Beth Chan and Zheng Shen

June 6

To finish up the quarter, we'll discuss at least the first part of this recent article:

Christensen, K. R. & Nyvad, A., (2024) “Complexity, frequency, and acceptability”, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 9(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.10618