Category: Faculty News

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:

• Max Kaplan and Amanda Rysling, “Is phonotactic repair of onset clusters modulated by listener expectations?”
• Jack Duff, Pranav Anand and Amanda Rysling, “No cost for canceling causal inferences in the comprehension of short English narratives”
• Vishal Arvindam, Maxime Tulling and Ailís Cournane, “Representing non-actuality in the online processing of negative and possibility utterances”
• Matthew Kogan and Matthew Wagers, “Maintaining Syntactic Positions and Thematic Roles in Memory: Evidence from Ditransitive Alternations in English”
• Lalitha Balachandran, Stephanie Rich and Matthew Wagers, “Domain-sensitivity of sentence memory and (lack of) temporal contiguity effects”
• Vishal Arvindam and Matthew Wagers, “The time course of processing anti-local anaphors in Telugu supports the Local Search Hypothesis”

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

CreteLing celebrated its fifth anniversary this summer, which took place from July 15 to July 28 in Rethymnon, Greece. 

Professor Ivy Sichel co-taught a class with Karlos Arregui (Professor, University of Chicago) titled “Socio-grammar”, which focused on gender asymmetries and markedness in language and the actual world. And Professor Sichel described her experience at CreteLing as “a perfect balance between intense learning and a laid-back communal atmosphere”.

Professor Roumyana Pancheva co-taught a class on “Comparative Syntax and Semantics of Slavic” with Barbara Citko (Professor, University of Washington) and Sergei Tatevosov (Professor, Moscow State University).

Professor Emerita Donka Farkas co-taught “The Semantics of Mood” with Paul Portner (Professor, Georgetown University).

B.A. alumnus Eric Baković (Professor and Chair at UC San Diego) co-taught “Computation, Learning and Phonological Theory” with Adam Albright (Professor, MIT).

Ph.D. students Yağmur Kiper and Elifnur Ulusoy, M.A. students Duygu Demiray and Larry Lyu, and recent B.A. alumnus Jackson Confer were also in attendance.

(Photo credits: CreteLing Summer School Facebook)