Month: June 2024

Spring field methods class

Offered in alternating years, this year’s Field Methods class, taught by Assistant Prof. Mia Gong, focused on Khalkha Mongolian. The class worked with one speaker, Enja Volodya, in the Bay Area. Elicitations took place in various forms (virtual and in-person) and locations (campus and Los Gatos Public Library), which provided essential training for the class to adapt to different situations conducting fieldwork.

We thank the speaker for her valuable contribution and look forward to the meaningful work to come out in the future!

Class photo (from left to right): (back row) Larry Lyu, Ian Carpick, Aidan Katson, Emily Knick, Ruoqing Yao, Richard Wang, Andrew Kato; (front row) Yağmur Kiper, Enja Volodya, Hanyoung Byun Mia Gong (not pictured)

Successful LURC 2024

On June 7, the annual Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) took place at the London Nelson Center in downtown Santa Cruz. LURC showcases a variety of linguistic research by UCSC undergraduates majoring in Language Studies and Linguistics.

This year’s LURC features nine posters:

  • Monique Aingworth, Julia Helmer, Grace Nighswonger: The impact of coordination ambiguity on garden path sentences
  • Amenia Denson: Mixed directionality in A’ingae nasal spreading
  • Samuel Almer: Pre-nasal raising patterns in California English
  • Killian Kiuttu: Color harmony in Dolgan
  • Amanda Pollem, E.Z. Dashiell, Jennifer Hernandez, Jordy Chanon, Valen Munson: Specificity and constraint in word prediction
  • Cal Boye-Lynn: Chasing phantoms of auditory bias
  • Andrew Kato: Restricting the scope of a relative measure
  • Millie Hacker: The gradual deletion hypothesis: Evidence from variable denasalization in Hixkaryana
  • Benjamin Sommer, Samuel Almer, Michael Proctor (Macquarie University), Rachel Walker (Faculty): Annotating acoustic speech data with MATLAB tools

This year’s distinguished alumni speaker is Prof. Kirby Conrod (BA, 2011, now Assistant Prof. at Swarthmore College), who gave a talk titled “Pronoun Euphoria”.

Congrats to everyone on their achievement, and thank you to all the faculty and volunteers who contributed to organizing the conference!

  • Prof Matt Wagers giving an opening speech as the department chair