WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Ph.D. alumna (2020) Maho Morimoto recently joined the Faculty of Commerce at Chuo University as an assistant professor. She will teach English to business, accounting, marketing, and banking students.
From Maho:
Chuo University’s campus is located in the suburb of Tokyo right next to a zoo and is built on a hill, which reminds me a little of the UCSC campus. I will continue my research collaboration with the Speech Communication lab at Sophia University, where I worked for 2 years as a postdoc. If you ever have a chance to visit Tokyo, let me know and we can go on a little nice hike in Mt. Takao!
Many congrats, Maho!
On March 11, the Department hosted its annual Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference, attended by prospective graduate students, current students, faculty, and alumni. The program included presentations by three graduate students and alumnus Eric Potsdam (PhD, 1996), now Professor at University of Florida.
The student presentations showcased recent research going on in the department, featuring:
The Distinguished Alumnus Lecture given by Eric is on “Exceptives, Ellipsis, and Negation“.
Thank you to all of the students, staff, and faculty who contributed to making this event a success!
Undergraduate student Andrew Kato recently gave a talk at ILLS 16 (the Annual Meeting of the Illinois Language & Linguistics Society) titled “The scope-taking of relative measurements” hosted at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (March 1-2). Among the keynote speakers was alum Ruth Kramer (Ph.D. 2009), whose plenary talk was titled “The case against phonological gender assignment: Crosslinguistic evidence from Hausa, Guébie and beyond”.
UCSC Linguistics was well-represented at the centennial Linguistics Society of America meeting that took place in the heart of New York, NY, from Jan 4-7.
Poster-wise, fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Yaqing Cao presented a poster on “Modals and negations LF-PF (mis)matches in English and Mandarin” and second-year Ph.D. student Richard Wang presented a poster on “Distribution of neutral tone and retroflex lenition in Beijing Mandarin“.
Also in attendance were Profs. Matt Wagers and Maziar Toosarvandani, Robert Henderson (U. of Arizona, Ph.D. 2012), Caroline Andrews (U. of Zurich, B.A. 2011), Maura O’Leary (Swarthmore College, B.A. 2013).
Besides cherry blossom viewing on their bikes at ICU (Picture 1), Research Professor Emerita and Emeritus Junko and Armin worked on finalizing “Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory–Theory and Analysis”, a book co-edited with Nick Kalivoda (Ph.D. 2018) and Jennifer Bellik (Ph.D. 2019). This involved final proofreading, editorial corrections, correspondence with individual authors, and providing the index — bringing it to final publication in the summer.
The volume (Picture 2) contains the results of an NSF-funded project in the form of various singly and co-authored papers by the editors as well as UCSC linguistics undergrads, grads, and postdocs, including Richard Bibbs (7th-year Ph.D. candidate), Dan Brodkin (5th-year Ph.D. candidate), Yaqing Cao (5th-year Ph.D. candidate), Ben Eischens (Ph.D. 2022, now Assistant Professor at UCLA), Ed Shingler (B.A. 2021), Max Tarlov (B.A. 2021) and Nicholas Van Handel (Ph.D. 2022).
During their Spring sojourn in Japan, Junko and Armin had two UCSC-related get-togethers. First, at an Italian trattoria in Tokyo appropriately called “La Mora” (Picture 3), they dined with Haruo Kubozono (visiting scholar at the Linguistics Research Center 1993-94, now at National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, or NINJAL), Maho Morimoto (Ph.D. 2020, now a postdoc at Sophia University in Tokyo), and Motoko Katayama (PhD 1998, now a medical doctor heading her own Obstetrics & Gynecology clinic in Kunitachi, Tokyo).
Second, travels in Japan with Bill Ladusaw (Retired Professor Emeritus) and his partner Ken Christopher landed the four of them at an onsen (hot spring spa) near Nikko, Japan (Picture 4).
AMLaP23 took place from August 31st to September 2, with many current and former Banana Slugs in attendance. It was hosted by the Basque Center for Brain and Language in San Sebastián-Donostia, whose mountain-hemmed, fog-suffused shores were eerily reminiscent of [Matt’s] home. There were six presentations from current students and faculty:
All of their abstracts can be found here.
We also ran into many former slugs, like Kelsey Sasaki (Ph.D. 2021, now Junior Research Fellow at Oxford; presenting joint work with Matt Husband, Daniel Altshuler and Runyi Yao) and Jakub Dotlačil (Assitant Professor at Utrecht). And Professor Liv Hoversten from Psychology, who completed a postdoc at BCBL, was also present.
From left to right: Kogan, Arvindam, Wagers, Dotlačil, Duff, Kaplan, Rich, Sasaki, Hoversten; not pictured: Balachandran
