Category: Student News

Wax Cavallaro named as finalist at 2024 Grad Slam

On March 2, fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Maya Wax Cavallaro took part in this year’s Grad Slam and made it into the final round of the competition. Her talk was titled Syllables in Our Minds: Evidence from a Learning Experiment (from 1:01:02-1:07:33). Maya went through tough competition and won the Humanities Division preliminaries on Feb 7, securing a spot in the final round to compete with winners from four other divisions (Arts, Engineering, Physical and Biological Sciences, and Social Sciences).

As background, Grad Slam is a communication contest hosted by the UC Santa Cruz (and across all UC campuses) Graduate Division that is open to all graduate students, where participants have a maximum of three minutes to explain their graduate research or artistic endeavor to a general audience.

Congratulations to Maya on her wonderful performance and on showcasing linguistic research to a wide audience!

Another successful LASC in the book

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:

  • Eli Sharf (3rd-year): “Restrictive Modifiers in Parenthetical Positions”
  • Elifnur Ulusoy (3rd-year): “Effects of Hierarchical Structure in Agreement Attraction: Evidence from Turkish”
  • Maya Wax Cavallaro (5th-year): “The Syllable in Domain Generalization: Evidence from Artificial Language Learning”

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!

  • LASC presenters (left-right): Elifnur Ulusoy, Maya Wax Cavallaro, Eli Sharf, Eric Potsdam

Slugs at UIUC

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”.

Slugs in CDMX for FAMLi

UCSC linguists Ryan Bennett and Maya Wax Cavallaro presented at Form and Analysis in Mayan Linguistics (FAMLi) VII in Mexico City Feb 22-23. Maya presented ongoing work on the development of final devoicing processes (“Domain generalization in right-edge phonological phenomena in Mayan“), and Ryan presented an invited conference plenary on the phonology of laryngeal features and segments (Spanish title: Segmentos y rasgos laríngeos en la familia maya: Evidencia que la fonología es abstracta, y distinta de la fonética; English translation: Laryngeal segments and features in the Mayan family: Evidence that phonology is abstract, and different from phonetics).

Also present were Robert Henderson (PhD 2012), Jaime Pérez González (Chancellor’s Postdoc 2021-2023), Sadie Lewis (BA 2023), and Professor Emerita Judith Aissen. Like Ryan, Jaime presented an invited conference plenary, dealing with preferred argument structure in Mocho’, titled “Preferred plot structure in Mocho’“.

You can find the streaming of the conference here (Feb 22, with Ryan and Maya’s presentations) and here (Feb 23, with Jaime’s presentation).

  • Slugs in attendance (left to right): Ryan, Robert, Jaime, Judith (photoshop credit to Maya), Sadie and Maya
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