Spring 2025 End-of-year celebration

On Thursday, June 12, the Linguistics Department held its End-of-Year Celebration in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge for our graduating students. The event brought together faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, friends, and family from across the UCSC linguistics community.

Here are a few highlights from the celebration:

  • Undergraduate Advising and Program Coordinator Gwyn Vandevere
  • Professor and Undergraduate Program Director Maziar Toosarvandani
  • Professor and Department Chair Matt Wagers

 

 

Santa Crucians at SALT

The 35th meeting of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 35) recently took place at Harvard University (May 20-22). Professor Adrian Brasoveanu gave a talk entitled “Towards a Cognitively Plausible Quantitative Formalization of Counterfactual Interpretation.” Several department alumni were also in attendance, including Professor Chris Barker (PhD, 1991; NYU) and the following presenters:

Pictured (from left to right): Robert Henderson, Scott AnderBois, Jack Duff, Chris Barker, Adrian Brasoveanu, and Kelsey Sasaki

Anand at Mayfest

During May 16-17, Professor Pranav Anand traveled to the University of Maryland for Mayfest, where he spoke and met up with several BA alums. This year’s Mayfest focused on constraints and gaps in lexical meaning, and Pranav’s talk, English ‘coming-to-know’ predicates: evidence and knowledge, reported on joint work with Natasha Korotkova on the lexical structure of a rich class of semi-factives. Also presenting was Professor Aaron Steven White (BA 2009), whose talk, Inducing lexical semantic generalizations, detailed a computational model that learns distributional and inferential generalizations. In addition to White, Pranav got the chance to catch up with recent BA alums Jackson Confer and Sadie Lewis, who were finishing their Baggett Fellowships, and Sarah Lee, who is now attending the University of California, College of the Law.

Professor Pranav Anand

More Banana Slugs moving on

Alexa Ballesteros, graduating with a double major in Linguistics and Spanish Studies, is headed to Valencia, Spain this fall to participate in the North American Language and Culture Assistants Program (NALCAP). As part of the program, she will assist in teaching English at an elementary school. Until her departure in September, Alexa is continuing her work as a research assistant with Professor Kim Helmer, contributing to The Happiness Project, an initiative aimed at improving the educational experience and mental well-being of international students. 

Millie Hacker

Millie Hacker, who is graduating with a BA in Linguistics, will be starting a PhD in Linguistics at Michigan State University, focusing on phonology and its interfaces with phonetics and sociolinguistics. Millie expects to be involved with the Michigan Diaries corpus project and analyzing longitudinal sound changes from its participants.

Congratulations, Alexa and Millie!

 

Successful end-of-the-year defenses

The final week of the quarter brought a flurry of successful defenses across all levels—dissertations, QP2s, and QP1s. Congratulations to all who reached these important milestones!

Dissertations

  • Myke Brinkerhoff, “Voice Quality and Laryngeal Complexity in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec”
  • Yaqing Cao, “Scope Reconstruction in Head Movement”

QP2s

  • Ian Carpick, “Deriving Vowel Reduction from a Law Governing Human Motion”
  • Richard Wang, “Investigating the role of duration in the categorization of Mandarin tone”

QP1s

  • Hanyoung Byun, “Interaction between consonant voicing and vowel devoicing in Seoul Korean”
  • Aidan Katson,“Expanding the nominal in English ACC- and POSS-ing nominalizations”
  • Emily Knick, “Future reference and covert modality in Khalkha Mongolian”
  • Ruoqing Yao, “Who and when gets to race? The distinguishedness effect in pronominal ambiguity resolution”
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