A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
The spooks of Stevenson were out in full modest force this Halloween and the WHASC Photographer was there to capture the horror.
(l to r): Mick Fleetwood, Spooky Tober, Autumnal Lady of the Knoll, Count Noun
(Not pictured: Steampunk Shrestha)
Last week we were fortunate to be joined by Elsi Kaiser (USC) who gave two talks during a multi-day visit.
In our inaugural colloquium of the year, on Friday, October 24, we heard Do birds of a feather flock together? Exploring interpretation and dissimilation of third person pronouns in English and Finnish. This talk brought together evidence from judgment, sentence processing and corpus studies to examine how clauses containing two pronominal arguments are interpreted — an underexplored area both in sentence processing and in the syntax & semantics of Finnish.
Only the day before, Elsi gave a presentation in s/lab, Experimenting with semantics and pragmatics: On subjective predicates and perspective-taking.
Friday night, we got to celebrate at a potluck hosted by Roumi, where a good time was had by all, and especially by one compelling feline [vide infra].
Newly issued trading card in the Experimental Semantics series. Photo credit: Jungu Kang.
Did someone mention “birds of a feather”? Photo credit: Jungu Kang.
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
Posters
Front (l to r): Sichel, Cartner & Gonzalez;
Back (“”): Katson, Slater-Smith, Webster, Kiper, Knick
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
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.
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 and collaborator Mildred Aledíz Clarivel Mejía
