Goings-on in Gotham

Santa Cruz was well represented at NELS56, recently held at NYU (October 17-19, 2025).

Current and erstwhile slugs delivered at least four talks and four posters at this year’s edition of NELS:

Talks

  1. Yağmur Kiper, “Ellipsis as leverage for dependent case theory”
  2. Emily Knick, “Proximate futures in English and Turkish: An analogy between spatial and temporal proximity”
  3. Aidan Katson, “Expanding the nominal in English ACC- and POSS-ing nominalizations”
  4. Emilio Gonzalez, (UCSC B.A. ’22), now a graduate student in Linguistics at UCSD, “Condition A, logophors, and wh-movement”

Posters

  1. Emma Slater-Smith,”An Agree-based Account of PCC in English Double Object Constructions”
  2. Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv University), “Intra-sentential code switching at the syntax-prosody interface”, co-authored with Julia Horvath
  3. Niko Webster and Ivy Sichel, “Subject islands do not reduce to construction-specific discourse function”, co-authored with Mandy Cartner, Matthew Kogan, and Matt Wagers

Front (l to r): Sichel, Cartner & Gonzalez;
Back (“”): Katson, Slater-Smith, Webster, Kiper, Knick

Rich in College Park

Recent grad Stephanie Rich (Ph.D., 2024), currently a post-doctoral research in the Psycholinguistics & Cognition Lab at Concordia University, recently delivered a colloquium talk at the University of Maryland Linguistics. Her talk was entitled “Exploring similarity based interference on the basis of context during encoding” [abstract], and it reported both on her thesis research, including collaborations with Dr. Lalitha Balachandran, as well as more recent projects at Concordia.

While at UMD she got a chance to catch up with Jackson Confer (B.A., 2022), formerly a Peer Advisor, Baggett Fellow and now Ph.D. student at Maryland.

Confer (BA, 22) and Rich (PhD, 24) at UMD

Sweet Memories of Eugene

Here at WHASC, our motto is practically “we would love to hear you from!”. And there is no statute of limitations on news from your (extra-)linguistic life. So, here’s a little summer throwback …

Rachel Walker gave a talk titled “Dynamics of Vocalic Articulations in Syllable Rhymes: Sesquisyllables in Australian English” on behalf of Michael Proctor and herself at DYMOS: Dynamical Models of Speech [conference program], a conference hosted July 26-27 at the LSA Linguistics Institute at the University of Oregon.

Lieberstein in Guatemala

Joshua Lieberstein — first-year MA student, second-year BA/MA student, long-time linguist — was in Guatemala over the summer to continue his investigation of K’iche’. He was awarded a FLAS Fellowship (through Vanderbilt) to attend the Mayan Language Institute (through Tulane University) for six weeks. Classes were taught by native speaker teachers and linguists and Joshua lived with two different families while enrolled in the program. He then went to Chichicastenango on his own for three weeks where the dialect of K’iche’ he focuses on is spoken. While there he conducted fieldwork and strengthened his connections for future trips, all while learning more K’iche’!

Lieberstein pictured with collaborator Mildred Aledíz Clarivel Mejía

Lieberstein and collaborator Mildred Aledíz Clarivel Mejía

BAyLI 4 Blows into town

While it is geographically irrefutable that Santa Cruz is a bay area, is it *in* the Bay Area?
 
This long-standing, and vexing, question probably advanced no closer to resolution by the fact the Departments of Linguistics and Psychology co-hosted the 4th meeting of the Bay Area Language Processing Interest Group (BAyLI) here on campus last Friday, October 10. Thankfully, the BAyLI presenters did move us at least a little bit closer to resolving some equally vexing questions about how brains language (and perhaps how acronymists do too).
 
BAyLI is a relatively new venue for early-career researchers to present work in the cognitive neuroscience of language and language processing from “around the Bay Area and Northern California.” In this edition, UCSC Linguistics PhD students were well represented. Subhs Shrestha presented her work ‘Mot-o or moto? How lexical access and morphosyntactic relations are processed during at-a-glance reading in Spanish’, and UCSC Linguistics PhD students Matthew Kogan and Ruoqing Yao presented ‘Modeling interference with distributed representations of lexical, morphological, and positional information’. They were also joined by UCSC Psychology PhD students Daniel Pfaff and Angela Montiel, and keynote speaker Jean E. Fox Tree, all in a very pleasant sun-lit Namaste Lounge. 
 
Kudos to the BAyLI organizers: Liv Hoversten and Meg Boudewyn in Psychology, and Dustin A. Chacón in Linguistics. We look forward to hosting a future BAyLI!
 
Linguistics Ph.D. student Subhs Shrestha presents her talk on morphosyntax in at-a-glance reading.

 

Prof. Jean E. Fox Tree (Psychology) gives the keynote address, “Talk to Me Like a Friend.”
 

Six Slugs A-sinnin’!

According to Wiktionary, a collective of slugs may be referred to as a cornucopia. With all due emphasis on that modal, there’s no denying that Banana Slugs were copious at last month’s edition of Sinn und Bedeutung. Held at Goethe University Frankfurt, SuB30 featured presentations from many community members:

You can see most of these folks pictured below!

(l to r): Sharf, Knick, Hofmann, Unidentified Frankfurter, Li, Tamura. Not pictured: Cao.

Biba Bibbs!

Earlier this July, Richard Bibbs defended his dissertation on Phonological Asymmetries from Phonetic Substance: Case Studies in the Special Status of Laryngeals (chaired by Ryan Bennett, with committee members Grant and Amanda). That, of course, merits its own kudos, but … there’s more.

While Richard has left the halls of Stevenson, he hasn’t wandered too far: on 9/15, he started his new role as an Undergraduate Advisor in the Economics department here on campus. Richard reports that he is excited to continue helping UCSC students, now outside of the Linguistics major. He promises to visit the department when he can, but you can visit him too: his new digs are in Engineering 2.

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