THI celebrates 25 years

The Humanities Institute (THI), a center for scholarly inquiry in the humanities on campus, has been celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. A recent long-form piece in the UC Santa Cruz Magazine recognizes THI’s many achievements, building critical infrastructure to support research excellence and student success.

THI was founded in 1999 by Professor Emeritus Jorge Hankamer, then Dean of Humanities, and linguists have continued to be involved in its development. THI’s Managing Director is Irena Polić (BA, 2001, MA 2003), and the current faculty director is Professor Pranav Anand. 

Congratulations, THI!

Jorge Hankamer, with Mary-Kay Gamel (Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature), Jennifer H. Yearley (BA, 1991) and April Dawn (photo by Don Harris; courtesy of UCSC Special Collections)

 

LURC 2025

The 2025 Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) took place on Friday, May 30. One of the longest running traditions in the Department, the conference featured the largest number of student presenters ever — 31! A total of 13 posters were presented by undergraduates on their original research across six subdisciplines: phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics, semantics, sociolinguistics, and syntax.

Every year, the conference features a Distinguished Alumnus/a Speaker, and this year was no exception. Anissa Zaitsu (BA, 2017; MA, 2018), currently a PhD student at Stanford, gave the keynote talk: “When negative concord fails: Focus, alternatives, and the semantics of double negation.”

Anagnostopoulou colloquium and mini-course

The past couple weeks have seen the exciting presence of Professor Elena Anagnostopoulou (University of Crete and IMS-FORTH) around the department. Elena gave a colloquium two Fridays ago on “Rethinking clitics: A view from Greek”, as well as a mini-course last week on testing models of parametric change with phylogenetic tools and methods. Many students and faculty also had the chance to talk with her one-on-one in meetings and in several dinners.

Duff to UCLA

 

Jack Duff

Jack Duff

Jack Duff (PhD, 2023) will be heading to UCLA, starting this coming fall, as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics. Jack has spent the past couple of years as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Saarland University (read about his time there in this WHASC post).

Congratulations, Jack, and welcome back to California!

 

Law and Hirschberg in the Journal of East Asian Linguistics

Professor Jess Law recently published a paper with a former BA student Colin Hirschberg, entitled “An affectedness approach to Mandarin passives“, in the Journal of East Asian Linguistics. Colin is now pursuing graduate studies in Linguistics at Rutgers University. This paper stemmed from the course LING188 Structure of Chinese Linguistics, taught by Jess in Fall 2021 and sponsored by UCSC Global Engagement. On April 18, Jess also gave a zoom talk based on this work at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. Congratulations, Jess and Colin! 

Abstract: Mandarin bei-passives differ from English be-passives in exhibiting robust semantic constraints. They need to be licensed, by telicity, the experiential perfect, or predicates allowing intention transmittion. These seemingly disjunctive licensing conditions can receive a unified account, based on the semantic notion of affectedness, which we analyze as a family of implicationally organized affectee roles following Beavers (2011). It is argued that Mandarin passives require the highest level of affectedness, which predicts the incompatibility with thematic liberality and the possibility of gapless passives. We also discuss how the affectedness approach can be extended in novel ways to understand the relevance of social impact in bei-passives and to capture cross-linguistic differences in passives.

Professor Li Nguyen Gave Talk at UCSC

On May 15, Professor Jess Law and incoming LAAL Professor Ariel Chan co-organized a talk by Professor Li Nguyen (Nanyang Technological University) entitled “Bilingualism on the ground: Insights from the Canberra Vietnamese-English Corpus”. The event drew attendees from across our campus as well as several linguists from nearby institutions.

Professor Li Nguyen giving talk at UCSC

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! 

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