SANTA CRUZ IN LEIDEN

A sequence of events at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands last week showcased the many links (intellectual and personal) that have been forged over the years between the Leiden department and the UCSC Linguistics Department. On Thursday, January 23rd, Anastasiia Ionova successfully defended her doctoral dissertation The Unbearable Lightness of Clitics. Anastasiia was a visiting graduate student at UCSC under the aegis of the Linguistics Research Center in 2017—2018, when she absorbed especially the work that was being done on the syntax-phonology interface. Her thesis probes the interaction between cliticization and ellipsis in Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian, as well as a set of prosodic effects linked with sluicing in Russian. The external examiners included alumna Vera Gribanova of Stanford, as well as James Griffiths, (who recently took up a position in linguistics at the University of Tübingen) and Güliz Güneş, a post-doctoral researcher at Leiden. James and Güliz also were LRC visitors (in 2012—13). The dissertation defense was followed on Friday, January 24th by a workshop on ellipsis which included papers by all of the above as well as Jim McCloskey and others. The program for the workshop is here.