WCCFL 41 takes place at UC Santa Cruz

This past weekend (May 5-7) saw over 125 linguists from around the world convene in and around Stevenson College for the 41st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 41). They presented 42 talks and 39 posters, on a wide range of topics in theoretical phonology, syntax, and semantics. Two special sessions brought together specialists on phi-features and deixis and anaphora; one virtual poster session enabled presenters not able to attend in person to participate; three invited speakers gave plenary talks on social gender and nominal structure, locality at the morphology-phonology interface, and demonstrative expressions.

The photo gallery below captures the lively spirit of the conference, which featured a conference dinner and other social events, alongside the talks and posters. For some attendees, the conference ended in a visit to the giant redwoods at Henry Cowell State Park, where a special session on “root structure” was held (video courtesy of fourth year PhD student Dan Brodkin).

In addition to many current faculty and students, alumni Andrew Hedding (PhD, 2022), Aaron Kaplan (PhD, 2008), and Line Mikkelsen (PhD, 2004) were present. Some other past members of the department were also in attendance, but were not captured photographically, including Vera Gribanova (PhD, 2010) and Boris Harizanov (PhD, 2014).

One person appears in only a couple of these photos, because she was behind the camera, fourth-year PhD student Yaqing Cao.

WCCFL 41 was made possible by the generous support of the Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz and the Department of Linguistics, as well as the tremendous dedication and hard work of many linguistics graduate students and LRC Coordinator Maria Zimmer.