Nikolas Webster Gave Invited Talk, Received Fellowship Awards

During May 9-10, PhD candidate Nikolas Webster visited the Department of Linguistics at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, to attend their Workshop on Nominals and Nominalization in Korean and Beyond. Niko gave an invited talk titled The internal arguments of Korean process nominals and complex predicates.

Niko giving his talk at UIUC

Niko also recently received two Presidential and Chancellor’s Dissertation Quarter Fellowship Awards from the UCSC Graduate Division, which will provide support for Fall 2025 and Winter 2026 to complete his dissertation. Congratulations, Niko! 

Successful BayPhon 2025

On May 10, 2025, UCSC Linguistics hosted BayPhon, a meeting that brought together about 35 faculty and students in the broader Bay area (San José State, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz) to present their work on phonetics and phonology. 

Those in attendance enjoyed a day of abundant sun, with exceptional views across Monterey Bay during lunch, and basked in the light of 11 inspiring presentations and warm conversations. Many thanks to the students and faculty who organized the event, especially the primary organizers: PhD students Hanyoung Byun, Richard Wang, and Professor Rachel Walker. 

UCSC researchers were among those presenting at the workshop:

  • Myke Brinkerhoff presented a talk titled “The acoustics landscape of voice quality.”
  • Hanyoung Byun presented a poster titled “Lenis obstruent voicing in Seoul Korean: Phonological or phonetic?”
  • Ian Carpick presented a talk titled “Deriving vowel reduction from a law governing human motion.”

Thanks to Jungu Kang for taking photos throughout the workshop. Some highlights are below:

  • PhD Student Ian Carpick
  • PhD Student Hanyoung Byun
  • PhD Student Myke Brinkerhoff
  • Professor Rachel Walker at the poster session with presenters

Nido de Lenguas at the Guelaguetza

Poster for the Guelaguetza

Nido de Lenguas continued its annual tradition of tabling at Senderos’ Vive Oaxaca Guelaguetza to raise public awareness about the Indigenous languages of Oaxaca. In addition to PhD students Max Kaplan, Matthew Kogan, and Maya Wax Cavallaro and undergraduate students Alexa Ballesteros and Jackie Torres (BA, Linguistics), this year’s team included students from the Estudiantes Oaxaqueños de Ahora, an interest group which aims to build a supportive community for Oaxacan students on campus. Its volunteers reported having a phenomenal time talking to guests about the languages and dialects they speak!

Raul Hernandez, Alexa Ballesteros, Jackie Torres, Lizbeth Ortiz, and Daisy Lopez (from left to right)
Raul Hernandez, Alexa Ballesteros, Jackie Torres, Lizbeth Ortiz, and Daisy Lopez (from left to right)
Nido de Lenguas table at the Guelaguetza
Nido de Lenguas table at the Guelaguetza
Maya Wax Cavallaro, Max Kaplan, Daisy Lopez, Alexa Ballesteros, Lizbeth Ortiz, and Jackie Torres (from left to right)
Maya Wax Cavallaro, Max Kaplan, Daisy Lopez, Alexa Ballesteros, Lizbeth Ortiz, and Jackie Torres (from left to right)
Nido de Lenguas table at the Guelaguetza
Nido de Lenguas table at the Guelaguetza
Matthew Kogan at the Nido de Lenguas table
Matthew Kogan at the Nido de Lenguas table

Recent faculty publications in phonology and phonetics

The past year has seen a spate of faculty publications in phonology and phonetics. Two are a product of collaborations between Professors Ryan Bennett, Grant McGuire, and Jaye Padgett and co-authors. One, “Effects of syllable position and place of articulation on secondary dorsal contrasts: An ultrasound study of Irish” (Journal of Phonetics, vol. 107), co-authored with Jenny Bellik (PhD, 2019), shows that the Irish palatalization contrast is produced less robustly in syllable codas than in onsets, and more variably in labial consonants and in codas. These results are related to cross-linguistic asymmetries in the occurrence of a palatalization contrast. The second, “Russian palatalization is a matter of the tongue body” (Journal of Slavic Linguistics, vol. 32) argues what its title says and against alternative accounts that view the Russian contrast as primarily one involving pharyngealization or [ATR].

Jaye also saw another article come out over the past year, also a collaboration with co-authors. “An acoustic study of ATR in Tima vowels: Vowel quality, voice quality and duration” (Phonology, vol. 41, e2) provides an acoustic analysis of the ATR contrast in Tima, a very understudied language of Sudan, and shows that voice quality is implicated in the contrast along with the more familiar F1 differences.

Anagnostopoulou colloquium

This Friday (May 23), the Department will welcome Professor Elena Anagnostopoulou (University of Crete and IMS-FORTH), who will give a colloquium talk entitled “Rethinking clitics: A view from Greek” (1:20 pm, Humanities 1, Room 202):

In this talk, I will revisit the relationship between clitic doubling and object agreement in connection to the syntax of clitics, via an assessment of three recent proposals on Greek clitic doubling. I will offer novel evidence based on co-ordination resolution supporting the view that clitic doubling involves a dependency  between a clitic with iφ and a DP with iφ. Finally, I will highlight  arguments that, in my view, are crucial to decide between different versions of movement analyses.

Professor Anagnostopoulou will be sticking around the Department next week, when she will give a two-day mini-course on parameters.

Anand, Hardt, and McCloskey in LI

The most recent issue of Linguistic Inquiry (volume 56, issue 2) has just appeared and it contains a paper by Professors Pranav Anand, Dan Hardt, and Jim McCloskey called “The Domain of Formal Matching in Sluicing.” This paper, like the 2019 paper by Deniz Rudin (PhD, 2018; USC) that it replies to and builds on (“Head-Based Syntactic Identity in Sluicing,” which also appeared in Linguistic Inquiry), emerged from the Santa Cruz Ellipsis Project, a project funded by the National Science Foundation which was active in the department between 2013 and 2019.

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