Slugs Embrace Yolo @ CAMP[8]

Santa Cruzans migrated en masse to Yolo County last weekend for CAMP[8], to participate in the eighth edition of the California Meeting on Psycholinguistics, held at UC Davis from Nov 14-16. CAMP featured presentations (in chronological order) from Matt Wagers (“Hands-on LLM Tutorial”, with Rachel Ryskin), Matthew Kogan & Ruoqing Yao (“Sources of distortion and confusion in distributed representations of morphosyntactic structure”, with Wagers) & Cal Boye-Lynn (“A Fricative by Any Other Name: A Close Replication of Shinn & Blumstein (1984)”, with Grant McGuire & Amanda Rysling).

It also featured encounters with a number of barn-yard animals, like a Muscovy duck (pictured), some friends from UCLA (also pictured), and near-collisions with Davis’ famously numerous cyclists (imagined anxiously).

Promenading duck at the Ruhstaller Farm. Photo credit: Subhs Shrestha.

Linguists, Applied Linguists and Psychologists, oh my! L to r: Shrestha, Liu, Chan (APLX), Boye-Lynn, Hoversten (PSYC), Rysling, Yao, Kogan, Duff (UCLA Linguistics; UCSC Ph.D. ’23), Carpick, Wagers. Photo credit: M. Afkir.

Beatty at NWAV

Sam Beatty, who graduated in Spring 2025, presented a poster at NWAV 53 at the University of Michigan (11/5-7), entitled ‘Gendered voices and transgender bodies: Interlocutor gender identity and linguistic variation in trans speakers’. The poster was co-authored with Grant McGuire and Ivy Sichel, and was based on their honors thesis. Sam reports that they received meaningful feedback, interacted with other sociolinguists, and had a great time overall.

Beatty, Sichel, & McGuire (2025)

Sichel & Toosarvandani in _Linguistic Inquiry_

Congrats to Ivy and Maziar, whose new article appeared this past month in Linguistic Inquiry:

We introduce a novel locality violation and its repair in Southeastern Sierra Zapotec: an object pronoun cannot cliticize when the subject is a lexical DP. We develop an account in which pronouns and lexical DPs interact with the same probe because they share featural content. In particular, we suggest that the Person domain extends to include nonpronominal DPs, so that all nominals are specified for a feature we call [δ] (to resonate with DP), while all and only personal pronouns are specified for [π]. This account aims to unify the locality violation with the Weak Person-Case Constraint (PCC), as well as parallel constraints based on animacy, and requires a departure from Chomsky’s (2000, 2001) classical system of featural covariation (Agree). A functional head must be able to overprobe—that is, interact with more than one goal, even if its requirements appear to be met. We introduce a probe activation model for Agree in which, after applying once, the operation can apply again, subject to certain restrictions. We compare probe activation with two other systems recently proposed to account for overprobing: Deal’s (2015, 2022) “insatiable probes” and Coon and Keine’s (2021) “feature gluttony.” Neither can account for the locality pattern in Zapotec.

 

Who’s Haunting At Santa Cruz?

The spooks of Stevenson were out in full modest force this Halloween and the WHASC Photographer was there to capture the horror.

 

Members of the Linguistics community in costume for Halloween

(l to r): Mick Fleetwood, Spooky Tober, Autumnal Lady of the Knoll, Count Noun
(Not pictured: Steampunk Shrestha)

It’s not easy being Orange in the UC

Kaiser Cavalcade

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.

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

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