Department of Linguistics
University of California, Santa Cruz
1156 High St.
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
matucker{at}ucsc{dot}edu
gtalk: matucker
Hello, my name is Matthew Tucker, and I am a third-year graduate student in linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Below are highlights and announcements of what I'm currently up to. For more information, click on any of the links above.
Posted 10 January 2010
Along with my classmate Robert Henderson, I recently delivered a talk at the 2010 Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting in Baltimore, MD. The paper, titled "Latest Insertion in K'ichee'," addresses the problem posed by prosodically conditioned suppletive allomorphy for late-insertion-based derivational models of morphology (such as Distributed Morphology). The handout is available in the Papers section and comments are greatly appreciated. This work is part of the ongoing Cross-Linguistic Investigations in Syntax-Phonology research cluster here at UCSC.
Posted 11 October 2009
This fall I'm working on three things, mainly: (i) learning some psycholinguistics while working in Matt Wagers' newly built sentence-processing lab. I'm worrying mainly about agreement attraction and our new eyetracker. (ii) the anaphor agreement effect, which will be the topic of a qualifying paper hopefully completed sometime soon. (iii) organizing for Formal Approaches to Japanese Linguistics 5, to be held here at UCSC in the spring.
Posted 10 June 2009
I am currently participating in a research group here at UCSC called Cross-Linguistic Investigations in Syntax-Phonology. This team is hoping to use typological work to shed some light on the interactions between seriality and cyclicity in morphosyntax and morphophonology. Please see the CrISP website for output, etc. Comments on our progress are most definitely welcome!
Posted 30 May 2009
I recently defended my first qualifying paper, which I wrote under the direction of Junko Ito. The paper is titled "The Root-and-Prosody Approach to Arabic Verbs" and is a detailed empirical examination of the derivational verbal system of Iraqi Arabic. In it, I propose a new Optimality-Theoretic analysis of root-and-pattern morphologies which derives all templatic effects from prosodic markedness constraints. The paper is available in the Papers section. Comments are most definitely appreciated!