Month: September 2022

John Rickford to give Stevenson College Distinguished Alumni Lecture

Professor John R. Rickford

Professor John R. Rickford

John R. Rickford, who is J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities at Stanford University, will give a Stevenson College Distinguished Alumni Lecture on Wednesday, October 19 at 3:00-4:30 pm in the Fireside Lounge. He will be speaking about his autobiography Speaking My Soul: Race, Life and Language. The lecture, which is co-sponsored by the Department of Linguistics, will be followed by a reception and book signing outside on the patio. 

Professor Rickford received his BA in sociolinguistics at UC Santa Cruz in 1971, with highest academic honors and honors from Stevenson College. He has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1980. Professor Rickford’s research has been recognized by an American Book Award, a Language and the Public Award from the Linguistic Association of America, and the Best Paper in Language Award, among other honors. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017 and was President of the Linguistic Society of America in 2015.

The Department of Linguistics maintains the John Rickford Undergraduate Development Fund to recognize his “distinguished intellectual achievements and for his unstinting commitment to marginalized communities and the languages that they speak.” The Fund provides new academic opportunities for distinguished undergraduates by supporting research projects, travel to conferences, and undergraduate linguistics club activities.

Contributions to the Rickford Fund can be made directly online or by mail.

Welcome back!

2022 Fall Welcome Event

Linguistics graduate students and faculty reconnecting after a busy summer of research

The Department gathered for its annual fall welcome event this past Friday (September 23) at the Cowell Provost House. The warm, sunny weather and spectacular views of the Monterey Bay provided the perfect setting for returning faculty and graduate students to catch up — and for them to welcome the department’s newest members to campus. 

This fall, five new graduate students joined the Department: Ian Carpick, Yağmur Kiper, and Richard Wang started on the PhD track, and Duygu Demiray and Larry Lyu on the MA track. In addition, the Department officially welcomed Delaney Gomez-Jackson, Matthew Kogan, and David Tuffs to the MA program, after their completion of the graduate coursework as BA students.

The Department also welcomed two new faculty members: Mia Gong, who started as Assistant Professor this fall, and Haoze Li, who is serving as Visiting Assistant Professor this academic year.

Students and faculty had a lot to share with each other, after what sounded like some busy summers of research. In the coming weeks, we will be sharing updates about what they were up to with you. Stay tuned!

Departmental honors

Since the last WHASC post, the Department’s students have received a number of honors.

Morwenna and Stephenie get Jorge Hankamer Award

PhD students Stephanie Rich (left) and Morwenna Hoeks (center), receiving the Jorge Hankamer Outstanding Graduate Instructor Award in Linguistics from Professor Pranav Anand (right)

Fifth-year PhD students Morwenna Hoeks and Stephanie Rich received the inaugural Jorge Hankamer Outstanding Graduate Instructor Award in Linguistics at the Humanities Award Ceremony on June 6. The award recognized their outstanding records as Teaching Assistants and contributions to the Department’s pedagogical community.

Several seniors graduating in Spring or Summer 2022 received department honors in the linguistics major:

  • Melissa Gee
  • Delaney Gomez-Jackson
  • Matthew Kogan
  • Haley Okumura
  • Nathan Potter
  • Caitlin Tran
  • David Tuffs
  • Lily Wainwright

as well as in the language studies major:

  • Emma Forbes
  • Bella Hawkins
  • Jacques Parvex

Numerous graduating seniors in the Department’s two majors were also elected to Phi Beta Kappa for 2021-2022:

  • Christina Bittman
  • Emma Forbes
  • Sarah Gray
  • Carmen Grey
  • Bella Hawkins
  • Sabrina Madden
  • Haley Okumura
  • Isabel Pacheco
  • Jacques Parvex
  • Graehme Sandbloom
  • David Tuffs
  • Lily Wainwright
  • Jasmin Yang
  • Linda Yang

Congratulations to all on their academic achievements!

Summer dissertations defended

Four PhD students defended their dissertations at the end of spring quarter or over the summer:

  • Andrew Hedding: “How to move a focus: The syntax of alternative particles” (June 7)
  • Benjamin Eischens: “Tone, phonation, and the phonology-phonetics interface in San Martín Peras Mixtec” (June 8)
  • Nick van Handel: “The sound of silence: Investigations of implicit prosody” (June 30)
  • Andrew Angeles: “Recursivity, prosodic adjunction, and the role of informativeness in Kansai Japanese compound nouns” (August 25)

Congratulations to all four, and best of luck in your future pursuits!

Arvindam receives the 2022 Gibson/Fedorenko Young Scholar Award

Fourth year PhD student Vishal Arvindam received the inaugural 2022 Gibson/Fedorenko Young Scholar Award. The prize, which honors two young scholars who have presented an outstanding talk at the Conference on Human Sentence Processing, comes with $1,000. Vishal’s talk (in collaboration with Matt Wagers) was entitled “Anti-local anaphors in Telugu are subject to local antecedent interference.” 

Congratulations, Vishal!

Professor Roumyana Pancheva joins the department

Roumyana Pancheva, who is currently Professor of Linguistics and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California, will be joining the Department of Linguistics in Winter 2023.

Professor Pancheva’s research is in syntax, semantics, and their interface. She uses formal models to investigate synchronic linguistic variation and diachronic change, with a particular focus on Bulgarian and other Slavic languages. Professor Pancheva has made important contributions to the theories of degree expressions, person and perspective, tense and aspect, evidentiality, and clitics and clause structure. Her research is also innovative for integrating formal modeling with experimental methods, in particular brain imaging.

Her papers have appeared in a range of influential journals, including Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, the Journal of Semantics, and Brain and Language. Professor Pancheva has been supported by a prestigious New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation, as well as grants from the National Science Foundation.

Congratulations, Roumi, and welcome to Santa Cruz!

Summer publications

The Department’s faculty and students saw a number of their publications appear in print over the summer, including: