Category: Events

John Rickford to give Stevenson College Distinguished Alumni Lecture

Professor John R. Rickford

Professor John R. Rickford

John R. Rickford, who is J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities at Stanford University, will give a Stevenson College Distinguished Alumni Lecture on Wednesday, October 19 at 3:00-4:30 pm in the Fireside Lounge. He will be speaking about his autobiography Speaking My Soul: Race, Life and Language. The lecture, which is co-sponsored by the Department of Linguistics, will be followed by a reception and book signing outside on the patio. 

Professor Rickford received his BA in sociolinguistics at UC Santa Cruz in 1971, with highest academic honors and honors from Stevenson College. He has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1980. Professor Rickford’s research has been recognized by an American Book Award, a Language and the Public Award from the Linguistic Association of America, and the Best Paper in Language Award, among other honors. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017 and was President of the Linguistic Society of America in 2015.

The Department of Linguistics maintains the John Rickford Undergraduate Development Fund to recognize his “distinguished intellectual achievements and for his unstinting commitment to marginalized communities and the languages that they speak.” The Fund provides new academic opportunities for distinguished undergraduates by supporting research projects, travel to conferences, and undergraduate linguistics club activities.

Contributions to the Rickford Fund can be made directly online or by mail.

Welcome back!

2022 Fall Welcome Event

Linguistics graduate students and faculty reconnecting after a busy summer of research

The Department gathered for its annual fall welcome event this past Friday (September 23) at the Cowell Provost House. The warm, sunny weather and spectacular views of the Monterey Bay provided the perfect setting for returning faculty and graduate students to catch up — and for them to welcome the department’s newest members to campus. 

This fall, five new graduate students joined the Department: Ian Carpick, Yağmur Kiper, and Richard Wang started on the PhD track, and Duygu Demiray and Larry Lyu on the MA track. In addition, the Department officially welcomed Delaney Gomez-Jackson, Matthew Kogan, and David Tuffs to the MA program, after their completion of the graduate coursework as BA students.

The Department also welcomed two new faculty members: Mia Gong, who started as Assistant Professor this fall, and Haoze Li, who is serving as Visiting Assistant Professor this academic year.

Students and faculty had a lot to share with each other, after what sounded like some busy summers of research. In the coming weeks, we will be sharing updates about what they were up to with you. Stay tuned!

LURC 2022

Today marks the annual meeting of the Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC). This year’s lineup featured four excellent talks by our undergraduates: (1) Animacy in Globally Ambiguous Sentences, by Briana Bugarin, Jackson Confer, Joyce Hong, Owen O’Brien, and Isabel Pacheco, (2) Local Syntactic Coherence Effects across Lexical Categories, by Sarah Lee, Sadira Lewis, Haley Okumura, (3) T-Glottalization in Utahn English, by Kim Tan, and (4) English Inversion and the EPP, by Emilio Gonzalez. All of this was followed up by another talk by distinguished alum Eric Baković: Vowel Harmony Functions, Complexity, and Interactions. The conference was a great success, and WHASC extends a congratulations and a thank you to everyone who organized and/or participated in this event. The full details can be found here.

AMP’D UP SLUGS

The Annual Meeting on Phonology happened just last weekend (Oct 1-3, 2021; hosted by Toronto), and it was positively infested with banana slugs.

Jaye, Ryan, Grant, and Máire Ní Chiosáin of University College Dublin presented their poster “Russian Palatalization is [back, high], not [ATR]”.

Ben Eischens presented a poster titled “Phonology is Phonetically Grounded but not Phonetically Detailed”, and Yaqing Cao presented “Revisiting Tone Sandhi Domain in Xiamen Chinese”.

In addition, alums Anya Hogoboom (UCSC Ph.D. 2006, William & Mary College), Eric Bakovic (UCSC B.A., 1993, UC San Diego) and Nathan Sanders (UCSC Ph.D., 2003, U of Toronto) participated in the AMP Teaching Workshop.

BANANA SLUGS AT CAMP 4

This weekend, many UCSC psycholinguists presented at the CAMP 4 (California Meeting on Psycholinguistics) hosted virtually by the University of California Irvine. Here were the projects presented by Banana Slugs:

“A mighty Maze! Revisiting strategic underspecification using the Maze task,” by Jack Duff, Shayne Sloggett, Nick Van Handel, Kelsey Sasaki, Stephanie Rich, Wesley Orth, Pranav Anand, Adrian Brasoveanu, and Amanda Rysling.

“Decomposing the focus effect: Evidence from reading,” by Morwenna Hoeks, Maziar Toosarvandani, and Amanda Rysling.

“Guiding Implicit Prosody with Delexicalized Melodies: Evidence from a Mismatch Task,” by Nick Van Handel, Matt Wagers, and Amanda Rysling.

“Ask Me Nicely,” by Elise Duffau and Jean E. Fox Tree.

“Hedging words in conversation,” by Allison Nguyen and Jean E. Fox Tree.

“WH-as-Intervener or Focus-as-intervener: A case study of Mandarin,” by Yaqing Cao and Jess Law.

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