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

 

Winter 2024 lab meetings

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

January 19

We'll start off the quarter by discussing this article on Shupamem:

Schurr H, Kandybowicz J, Nchare AL, Bucknor T, Ma X, Markowska M, Tapia A. Absence of Clausal Islands in Shupamem. Languages. 2024; 9(1):7. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9010007

January 26

Maho will give us a tutorial on doing Bayesian analyses of the results of acceptability experiments.

February 2

We'll discuss this article:

Huang, N. Finiteness in a language without finite morphology: An experimental study of Mandarin Chinese. Nat Lang Linguist Theory (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-023-09591-4

February 9

We'll continue our discussion of the N. Huang article from before, and if there's time, we can start in on this:

Wurmbrand, S. (2024). The Size of Clausal Complements. Annual Review of Linguistics, 10. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031522-103802

March 1

We'll shift gears this week and start in on this recent article:

Cuneo, N., & Goldberg, A. E. (2023). The discourse functions of grammatical constructions explain an enduring syntactic puzzle. Cognition, 240, 105563.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105563

March 8

Continuation of the Cuneo & Goldberg article!

March 15

For our last meeting of the quarter, we'll discuss this reaction to the Cuneo & Goldberg article:

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

Fall 2023 lab meetings

Our meetings this quarter will be Fridays, 11:30 - 1:00. 

October 13

We'll start the quarter off by reading the following recent article:

Fukuda, S., Ono, H., Tanaka, N., & Sprouse, J. (2023). Re-examining Island Effects with NP-scrambling in Japanese: The Effect of Individual Variation. Japanese/Korean Linguistics 30.

October 27

Continuation of our discussion of the Fukuda et al. article on scrambling in Japanese.

November 3

Seoyeon will give us a progress report on her project about pair-list and functional readings in Korean multiple-wh (echo) questions.

November 17

Unsub will present his work on negative polarity illusions in Korean. 

December 8

Grant will present his recent work on the COMP-trace effect in English.

December 15

Maho will give us a preview of her upcoming talk at the California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (CAMP). Maho's talk is on scrambling out of relative clauses in Japanese and its relation to presuppositionality.