ABOUT

I am a third-year graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at UCSC interested in semantics and syntax. My current project focuses on how semantic specificity influences focus intervention in Mandarin. This project is the first small step towards a larger project that aims to study how prominence, either prosodic, syntactic, or semantic richness, interacts with focus intervention. Another project I am currently working on is the interaction between negation, modalities, and weak islands. The specific question I asked is whether modalities can improve weak islands and whether this improvement can be reduced to other mechanisms.

Another area that I have been working on is presupposition. The specific semantic theories I am working in is DRT (Discourse Representational Theory) and Dynamic Semantics. Other areas I studied include presupposition projection, accommodation, and lexical idiosyncrasy in terms of their presupposed contents.

In addition to semantics and pragmatic questions, other languages that intrigued me are Chinese Wu and Min dialects, especially Xiamenese and Wenzhounese. I am interested in how the well-known tone sandhi patterns in those dialects are captured in OT framework and how syntax-phonology interface constraints like MATCH and ALIGN  explain these patterns.

 

CONTACTS

ycao83 [at] ucsc (dot) edu
Linguistics Department
UC Santa Cruz
1156 High Street
Santa Cruz, CA 95064