Category: Alumni News

John Rickford’s Autobiographical Essay Published in Annual Review of Linguistics

Professor John Rickford

The Annual Review of Linguistics has published an autobiographical article by Professor John Rickford, tracing his decades-long career in linguistics. The essay begins with a brief account of Professor Rickford’s time as an undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz, and delves into his research and professional journey across multiple institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Guyana, and Stanford University. The essay also discusses “Activist Sociolinguistics,” with reflections on the development of sociolinguistics and the role of linguistic research in social justice.

Abstract: My autobiographical essay begins with a brief section on my high school experience, then goes into more substantive detail about my research and publications over the past 55 years at the universities I attended (University of California, Santa Cruz; University of Pennsylvania) or at which I worked (University of Guyana, Stanford University) and since I retired in 2019. I mention my key mentors and influencers, including Roger Keesing, J. Herman Blake, Robert Le Page, and William Labov. And I identify some of the foci of my research over the years, including vowel laxing in Guyanese personal pronouns, prior creolization in the history of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), the Ebonics controversy, stylistic variation in sociolinguistics, quotative , and racial disparities in automated speech recognition. Finally, I focus on “Activist Sociolinguistics,” including fighting for increased success for AAVE and other vernacular speakers in schools and for increased justice for them in the courtroom.

Read the full-length article here: [link]

Alum interview: Morwenna Hoeks

Morwenna Hoeks

Morwenna Hoeks

Morwenna Hoeks received her PhD in 2023, with a dissertation entitled “Comprehending focus / representing contrast”, co-advised by Professors Amanda Rysling and Maziar Toosarvandani. Since then, she has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück. Morwenna was also the recipient in 2024 of a prestigious Humboldt Research Fellowship.

The WHASC Editors recently asked Morwenna a couple questions about how postdoc life in Germany has been going:

Can you share a bit about your journey from UCSC to your current position at the University of Osnabrück? 

My journey to the University of Osnabruck started quite a while ago, in summer 2022, when a postdoc position in Prof. Dr. Nicole Gotzner’s lab was advertised. I was still working on my dissertation then, on the processing of focus and alternative sets, and I wasn’t really ready to move on just yet. But the research at this lab was very much related to my own, and would be a natural extension of the work I was doing back then, so I decided to apply anyway. Unfortunately I did not get that first position, but Nicole Gotzner decided to support me in applying for a fellowship that could still fund a position for me at the University of Osnabrück through third-party funding. This was a perfect opportunity for me, as it gave me a bit more time to wrap up my work at UCSC, and also gave me valuable experience writing grant applications like these. In summer 2023, almost exactly a year later, I therefore ended up applying to one of the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowships. The grant application ended up being successful and I will start this fellowship this summer. In the meantime,  the University of Osnabrück has already been able to fund my stay since February 2024.

So you recently received a prestigious Humboldt Fellowship—congratulations! What will that fellowship support, and how do you envision it shaping your research moving forward?

The grant allows me to stay at the Institute of Cognitive Science, at the University of Osnabrück, to work with Prof. Dr. Nicole Gotzner on the connection between focus and scalar implicature. In a nutshell, the project will basically be an extension of the line of work I started at UCSC on focus and alternative set processing, but here I will widening up the empirical terrain by comparing the alternatives involved in focus with those involved in scalar implicature. Theoretically, there are many open questions about potential differences and commonalities between the alternatives involved in the interpretation of focus and the generation of scalar implicatures, and how scales of various kinds play a role in each of them. Here, I will try to get at these questions by running a series of offline and on-line experiments that compare the processing profile of focus and scalar implicature, with the larger goal of uncovering these potential commonalities (or asymmetries) between the two phenomena. Specifically, the project will use information about the time-course of comprehenders’ reasoning about focus and SI alternatives as a window into both the semantic representations, as well as the underlying cognitive mechanisms that comprehenders use to reason about the relevant alternatives. This was exactly the kind of work I always wanted to be doing: using experimental methods to bridge the gap between semantic theory and psycholinguistics. 

Reflecting on your transition from graduate student to a postdoc, what were some of the challenges you faced, and how did you navigate them?

The transition from graduate student to postdoc has been a gradual process for me, with some notable challenges along the way. One of the initial hurdles was fully embracing the reality that I had earned my PhD—it took a little time for that accomplishment to truly resonate, and I still have a lot of imposter syndrome. Then there are inherent challenges that come with doing a postdoc: it’s another temporary stay in another country, speaking yet another language, but this time without the support of a graduate community. For me, this meant adapting to a new academic culture with an entirely new set of written and unwritten rules, which has been quite a learning experience. Navigating this has involved a bit of relying (and extending) my existing network, but mostly just asking stupid questions.

Based on your experiences, do you have any advice for current students as they prepare for the next steps in their careers?

I don’t think I have any advice that is not incredibly cheesy and current students will actually want to hear. But in the above, I think that there are two pieces of advice that are most obvious: The first one is that it has worked out well for me to start applying to things earlier rather than later—probably a bit earlier than I truly felt comfortable to. Although there were many struggles along the way and there wasn’t always necessarily a clear path forward, the fact that I bought myself so much time by starting early did really pay off in the end. The second one is the realization of how important it is to invest in the community, at UCSC and beyond. Postdoc life (and I’m sure, faculty life, too, in some cases) can be quite isolating from time to time, and as may be clear from the above, I have really missed having the UCSC Linguistics community around quite a bit. I don’t think we fully realize this as graduate students until we actually leave (at least I didn’t), but it’s quite exceptional to have so many people around to talk to on a daily basis. As a student, the amount of activities and commitments can be quite overwhelming, but right now it has been really great to have a network of UCSC alumni to draw from. So see it as an investment, and enjoy it while it lasts 🙂

 

UCSC Alums and Linguists contribute to festschrift honoring Maria Polinsky

This month (January 2025) marked the publication of a rich and varied collection of research papers in linguistics in a festschrift honoring Maria Polinsky (Professor emerita at the University of Maryland). The volume, entitled Syntax in Uncharted Territories: Essays in Honor of Maria Polinsky, was published on the University of California’s open access eScholarship research repository. All papers in the collection are now available for download from the eScholarship platform. The collection was edited by Lauren Clemens (University at Albany, State University of New York), by Santa Cruz PhD alumna Vera Gribanova (Stanford University) and by Gregory Scontras (UC Irvine).

Among the papers in the volume is one co-authored by PhD alumna Ruth Kramer (Georgetown University) with Luke James Adamson (Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft). Their paper deals with the theoretical challenges posed by a passive-like construction in Jarawara (a language of Brazil), whose properties they link with recent research on Algonquian inverse systems. Also in the volume is a paper by professor emerita Sandy Chung. Sandy’s paper, titled “Antipassive in a Minimalist Universal Grammar” argues — drawing primarily on evidence from Austronesian languages — that antipassive should be deconstructed into two characteristic and independently varying properties: demotion of the internal argument, and voice marking.

Link to the full volume: [link]

Alumni interview with Jack Duff

Jack Duff

Jack Duff

The WHASC Editors recently got a chance to catch up with Jack Duff, who received his PhD from the Department in 2023. His dissertation (coadvised by Pranav Anand and Amanda Rysling) was entitled “On the timing of decisions about meaning during incremental comprehension.” Since graduating, he has been a Postdoctoral Researcher at Saarland University, where he has continued his psycholinguistic research on the processing and representation of linguistic meaning.

Can you share a bit about your journey from UCSC to your current position at Saarland University?

In May 2023, while I was beginning to write my dissertation, I saw a grant-funded post-doc position advertised here at Saarland with Vera Demberg’s group, on developing computational cognitive models of pragmatic processing. I was a big fan of some of the group’s recent work, and I had already been thinking about computational modeling as another tool I wanted in my toolkit, so it was too good an opportunity to pass up. It wasn’t a perfect match though: the start date was just a few months away, and despite my interest, I hadn’t yet taken on any serious modeling work myself. Still, I sent in a quick application.

After an interview and a job talk over Zoom, I was offered a 2-year position. Thankfully, we were able to negotiate a start date, January 2024, that left me a few extra months to use up my current funding, and finish my dissertation. I did, and since then, I’ve been here in Germany, getting serious about computational modeling, starting projects with this group, and teaching bachelors and masters students in the computational linguistics program, while continuing my other collaborations with people at UCSC and beyond.

What aspects of your graduate studies were most influential in shaping your research career?

I was tremendously lucky at UCSC to work with advisors and mentors on projects across many disciplines. I couldn’t do the work I do today if I didn’t have the diverse practical experience and support that came from those relationships: scheming up processing theories with insight from general cognition with Amanda, building generalizations from careful consideration of heaps of individual examples with Pranav, identifying and honing the core of a argument with Maziar and Ivy, unearthing patterns of data and ideas in unlikely places with Matt and Sandy, keeping pace with new developments in cognitive science with Adrian, the list goes on! No project could ever combine all the research questions I worked on during my PhD, but every project I take on these days benefits from all of those skills.

How has your research focus evolved since you graduated from UCSC? Are there any new areas in linguistics that you’re excited to explore?

As I hoped when I took the job, in my work here at Saarland I’ve been able to work with some new methods in computational modeling for psycholinguistic theories. For instance, in one of my recent projects, I’ve been building models with the cognitive architecture ACT-R to simulate how individual differences in general problem-solving strategies could determine individual differences in responses and response times in an ad-hoc implicature task. I find that these tools don’t change the focus of my work, but they allow a way to formalize and generate exact predictions from hypotheses that otherwise would be too nebulous to propose or defend. (To exaggerate a bit: now that I know my way around these methods, doing psycholinguistics with strictly verbal models sometimes feels like doing syntax without drawing trees!) I’m looking forward to continuing to use these methods to spell out and test theories at the interface between processing and general cognition.

What has been the most rewarding aspect of your academic career so far, particularly in terms of your research contributions?

I’ll need more time and experience to feel like I can identify what has been most rewarding! But something recent that’s been very satisfying has been the joy of working on the same question for long enough to prove myself wrong. (Of course, it turns out this doesn’t actually take all that long.)

In my dissertation, over a couple of experiments, I had tried and failed to find any sign of processing difficulty during reading associated with initially-appealing interpretations of discourse coherence that were ultimately incorrect (e.g. a passage “S1 S2” that initially could, but ultimately couldn’t, describe a causal sequence “S1 because S2”). I thought this might be a firm generalization, that such effects might never exist, and readers could always be somewhat conservative about pragmatic-level decisions of meaning.

But this year, I’ve been working with Daniel Altshuler and fellow recent UCSC alum Kelsey Sasaki, both at Oxford, to continue that search, and recently, we’ve found a few cases where we do observe evidence of processing difficulty, evidently because readers sometimes make rapid incremental analyses in this domain. This has raised all sorts of puzzles (what controls the variation between experiments? task effects? subtleties of stimuli?), and it’s clear that we’ll have much more to do before we can reach a new stable explanation, but there’s a lot of excitement in this re-theorizing, and in feeling the progress towards a more complete picture of things.

Andrew Kato and Eli Sharf at Amsterdam Colloquium

Andrew Kato (left) and Eli Sharf (right)

At the Amsterdam Colloquium 2024 this past December, PhD student Eli Sharf and undergraduate student Andrew Kato presented their latest research. Eli delivered a presentation titled “What Appositives Can Tell Us About Names and Definite Descriptions”. Andrew presented “Relative Quantification and Equative Scope-Taking.”

In addition, several other UCSC linguists and alumni presented their latest research as well: Natasha Korotkova (Utrecht), in collaboration with Pranav Anand, discussed joint research in their talk titled “Facts, Intentions, Questions: English ‘Coming-to-Know’ Predicates in Deliberative Environments.” Jack Duff (PhD 2023), in collaboration with Daniel Altshuler, presented “Reanalysis in Discourse Comprehension: Evidence from Reading Times”. Hitomi Hirayama (PhD 2019) presented “A Pragma-Semantic Account for Negative Island Obviation by wa in Japanese”, and Tom Roberts (PhD 2021) delivered a talk titled “Just-Asking Questions”.

The proceedings are available here.

Louise McNally named an LSA Fellow

Professor Louise McNally (PhD, 1992) has been named a 2025 Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). Louise, who is currently Professor in Department of Translation and Language Sciences at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, joins a distinguished group of linguists celebrated for their sustained impact on the field, including several other UC Santa Cruz alumni and faculty.

Congratulations on this well-deserved honor, Louise!

ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT: Andrew Hedding

The WHASC Editors recently conducted a virtual interview with Andrew Hedding,

Andrew Hedding

who completed his PhD in Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz in 2022 with a dissertation titled How to Move a Focus: The Syntax of Alternative Particles. After graduating, Andrew joined the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington, where he is now an Assistant Professor.

What kind of research are you working on at present?

Since finishing at UCSC, I’ve continued to work on various aspects of the syntax of Mixtec languages (which was the main focus of my dissertation). A few of my current projects emerged more or less directly out of questions left unanswered by my dissertation (e.g., on non-interrogative uses of wh-words), but I’ve also started a few completely new projects looking at new domains of Mixtec syntax (e.g., on argument structure). One project emerging out of my dissertation is co-authored with Michelle Yuan from UCLA. In a recent NELS presentation, we compared subextraction possibilities in San Martín Peras Mixtec with apparent subextraction in Tseltalan Mayan languages (the Tseltalan data comes from a recent paper by Judith Aissen and Gilles Polian). Though the languages display superficially similar patterns, we identify a number of empirical differences which we correlate with distinct syntactic properties of the languages. Ultimately, we argue that the superficially similar patterns emerge via distinct derivations.

Can you share a bit about your journey from UCSC to your current role at the University of Washington? Looking back, what was the transition from life as a graduate student to life as a faculty member like? Did you feel prepared for the transition? Was there anything unexpected that you faced?

After finishing my PhD, I got a position as a one-year visiting professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. During that visiting year, I applied for (and ultimately got) a permanent tenure track position here. On the one hand, I felt prepared for life as a faculty member—I had taught or TAed versions of the same classes while at UCSC, and I had experience balancing my teaching and research responsibilities. At the same time, however, the transition was hard. Between teaching more classes (as the primary instructor), added service responsibilities, meeting new colleagues, and moving to a new city, there were times when it was very overwhelming. I’ve had to be patient with myself, but now that I am in my third academic year at UW, I feel like each quarter is getting a bit easier. 

What advice would you give to current UCSC graduate students who are aspiring to enter academia or pursue similar career paths?

At times the job market can be very frustrating and disheartening—I was on the job market for 3 years and faced a lot of rejection. Getting a job requires hard work, but it also requires luck. My advice would be to focus on the things you can control: work hard to create a few research projects that you can be proud of, present at conferences and meet people in your area, cultivate your teaching and mentorship skills, and most of all, be resilient. 

How has your research evolved since you graduated from UCSC? Are there any particular influences or experiences that played a major role in shaping your current research focus?

Since leaving grad school, I have done more theoretically-informed language description, in addition to my “strictly-theoretical” work. Ben Eischens (another UCSC alum, now at UCLA) and I recently wrote a paper describing the phonology of San Martín Peras Mixtec, another in Spanish that transcribes a personal narrative, and we are currently working on a third that describes the basic morphosyntax of the language. In part, these projects have emerged as we have gained a deeper understanding of the language. However, I think I have also been influenced by colleagues here at UW that have a deep commitment to language documentation and description. 

Looking ahead, what are some of the future directions for your research? Are there new areas or questions in linguistics that you’re excited to explore?

I expect that my future work will continue to focus on various aspects of Mixtec syntax and the ways that it interfaces with semantics and phonology. However, I am also excited by the prospect of collaborating more with colleagues at UW with diverse interests and backgrounds. As an example, I recently collaborated with two computational linguists here to conduct an “iconic” artificial language learning experiment while in Mexico. The artificial language we used is entirely pictographic, so it does not presuppose that participants be familiar with a particular set of sounds or even require that the participants be literate. In principle, this should make it more feasible for a diverse set of participants with varied language backgrounds to participate in this type of experiement. This summer, we ran an experiment which taught participants several different nominal modifiers, and then asked them to produce phrases with multiple modifiers, to see if participants would order them in a scope-isomorphic way. This was a completely different type of project for me, but it was fun, and I’m hoping to find more ways to collaborate with my new colleagues here in the future!

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