WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Jack Duff
Jack Duff (PhD, 2023) will be heading to UCLA, starting this coming fall, as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics. Jack has spent the past couple of years as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Saarland University (read about his time there in this WHASC post).
Congratulations, Jack, and welcome back to California!
Professor Jess Law recently published a paper with a former BA student Colin Hirschberg, entitled “An affectedness approach to Mandarin passives“, in the Journal of East Asian Linguistics. Colin is now pursuing graduate studies in Linguistics at Rutgers University. This paper stemmed from the course LING188 Structure of Chinese Linguistics, taught by Jess in Fall 2021 and sponsored by UCSC Global Engagement. On April 18, Jess also gave a zoom talk based on this work at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. Congratulations, Jess and Colin!
Abstract: Mandarin bei-passives differ from English be-passives in exhibiting robust semantic constraints. They need to be licensed, by telicity, the experiential perfect, or predicates allowing intention transmittion. These seemingly disjunctive licensing conditions can receive a unified account, based on the semantic notion of affectedness, which we analyze as a family of implicationally organized affectee roles following Beavers (2011). It is argued that Mandarin passives require the highest level of affectedness, which predicts the incompatibility with thematic liberality and the possibility of gapless passives. We also discuss how the affectedness approach can be extended in novel ways to understand the relevance of social impact in bei-passives and to capture cross-linguistic differences in passives.
The past year has seen a spate of faculty publications in phonology and phonetics. Two are a product of collaborations between Professors Ryan Bennett, Grant McGuire, and Jaye Padgett and co-authors. One, “Effects of syllable position and place of articulation on secondary dorsal contrasts: An ultrasound study of Irish” (Journal of Phonetics, vol. 107), co-authored with Jenny Bellik (PhD, 2019), shows that the Irish palatalization contrast is produced less robustly in syllable codas than in onsets, and more variably in labial consonants and in codas. These results are related to cross-linguistic asymmetries in the occurrence of a palatalization contrast. The second, “Russian palatalization is a matter of the tongue body” (Journal of Slavic Linguistics, vol. 32) argues what its title says and against alternative accounts that view the Russian contrast as primarily one involving pharyngealization or [ATR].
Jaye also saw another article come out over the past year, also a collaboration with co-authors. “An acoustic study of ATR in Tima vowels: Vowel quality, voice quality and duration” (Phonology, vol. 41, e2) provides an acoustic analysis of the ATR contrast in Tima, a very understudied language of Sudan, and shows that voice quality is implicated in the contrast along with the more familiar F1 differences.
The 43rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 43) took place a couple weekends ago at the University of Washington (April 25-27), with several Santa Crucians in attendance.
PhD student Aidan Katson gave a talk on Korean honorification as a window to understanding animacy,” while PhD student Niko Webster presented a poster on “The syntactic and semantic introduction of internal arguments.” Professor Mia Gong gave a talk on “Specification of D Derives Variation in Relative Clauses” (with Eszter Ótott-Kovács) and presented a poster, “Scrambling through the Looking Glass: Two Types of Movement across Weak Islands.” Professor Maziar Toosarvandani was also in attendance as an audience member.
The Santa Cruz students and faculty got a chance to catch up with some past members of the department. Professor Ruth Kramer (PhD, 2009; Georgetown) gave a talk on “Passivization, speech act participants, and third-person probes in Jarawara” (with Luke Adamson). Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv), a recent visitor in the Department, co-presented a talk, “The bilingual lexicon under Distributed Morphology: An investigation of gender agreement in code-switching.” Professor Andrew Hedding (PhD, 2022), now an Assistant Professor at UW, was on hand as one of the conference’s organizers.
As the academic year comes to a close, we’re proud to celebrate our graduating students and recent alumni as they embark on their next steps in linguistics and beyond. This year, Banana Slugs are headed to a variety of excellent graduate programs, fellowships, and professional opportunities. Whether continuing to pursue research in linguistics or exploring new paths and territories, our students carry with them the skill and curiosity honed at UCSC to their next chapters. Congratulations to all — we can’t wait to see where your journeys take you!
Katie Arnold, MA program at University of British Columbia
This fall, I will be joining the UBC Department of Linguistics as a MA student! I’ll be working with Dr. Anne-Michelle Tessier in her Child Phonology Lab. I’m looking forward to this opportunity to continue developing my research skills and learning about linguistics.
Katie Arnold
Jackson Confer, Baggett Fellowship and PhD Program at the University of Maryland
After taking a break from my studies for a year, I decided to apply for the Baggett Fellowship at University of Maryland. After spending some time here, I completely fell in love with the department; when it came time to apply to grad schools this cycle, I already knew that I wanted to stay. I really appreciate the explicit marriage between formal and experimental approaches here and the extensive cross-talk that comes with that. In the fellowship, I’ve mostly been doing formal work on the syntax of exceptives and coordination, but I plan to add an experimental dimension to this work as I transition into the PhD program.
Jackson Confer
Andrew Kato, PhD Program at UCLA
With a strong history of research in formal semantics and the syntax-semantics interface, I’ll be heading to UCLA as a PhD student starting Fall ’25. The department’s large size even beyond its s-side faculty also makes for a good opportunity to explore lingering interests of mine in other subfields, mainly computational linguistics and philosophy of language.
Andrew Kato
Sadie Lewis, Baggett Fellowship at the University of Maryland, PhD program at University of Chicago
During my Baggett Fellowship I worked with Masha Polinsky mainly doing fieldwork on Kaqchikel (Mayan). I started working on negation in that language which was my main project. I stayed another semester on her grant “Variations in Exceptive Structures” and completed a project on Thai. Now I am working with Hedde Zeijlstra to work more on negation in Mayan. I will spend the summer in Göttingen and do some work on his ERC grant “Unpacking Paradigmatic Gaps”. Additionally, I have accepted a place at University of Chicago for a PhD in linguistics. I will start this Fall. I am hoping to work with Karlos (Arregi) and Erik (Zyman) and continue working on Kaqchikel.
Sadie Lewis
Akira Santerre, Certification of Pre-SLP at CSU San Marcos
Since I’m switching majors from Linguistics to Speech Language Pathology for my Master’s, I enrolled in a Certification of Pre-SLP at CSU San Marcos. It’s like a post-bacc. It’s nice because I can save money by completing all my prerequisite courses online. After I complete this, in a year, I’ll be all set to apply to a regular SLP master’s program. I’m hoping to get into CSU Long Beach. In the meantime, I’m planning to log some observation hours this summer!
Akira Santerre
Ivy Shaw, PhD in Romance Languages & Literatures at UC Berkeley
I’m incredibly excited to be starting as a PhD student in the Romance Languages and Literatures program at UC Berkeley this fall! The program allows for a comparative study of the linguistics of three Romance Languages, while also developing an in-depth knowledge of a primary language, mine being French. The program is interdisciplinary in nature, and I was drawn to the flexibility of designing a unique and personalized course load with a diversity of linguistic topics and approaches suited to exactly what I want to study. I look forward to expanding on the research I did as an undergrad at UCSC in Old French syntax and also in L2 phonology. The faculty and resources offered at Berkeley are incredible and I couldn’t be happier to be continuing my study of linguistics there.
Ivy Shaw
Kelsey Sasaki received her PhD from UC Santa Cruz in 2021. Since graduating, she has been a fellow of Jesus College at the University of Oxford. This coming fall, she will be starting a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Pomona College. The WHASC Editors recently wrote to Kelsey to ask about her academic journey since graduating.
Can you share a bit about your journey from UCSC to your current position at the University of Oxford?
My initial move from UCSC to Oxford hinged on an extremely lucky bit of timing. In the spring of 2021, I was in my sixth year and working on my dissertation, which explores various aspects of processing narrative discourse. At the same time, Daniel Altshuler was hiring a one-year, grant-funded postdoc at Oxford for a project exploring one particular aspect of processing narrative discourse (more on that below)! I was offered the position about an hour after my Zoom interview. That position was a great fit for me, not only because of the research topic, but also because Daniel gave it more of an equal collaboration dynamic than a top-down PI/postdoc one. No one would say that that fixed my confidence issues, but I can definitely say that it helped
Because that position was only for a year, I was right back on the job market upon arriving in Oxford. Working in the UK made me eligible to apply for my current position, the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. For that, I proposed a two-strand research project: one strand expands my dissertation research on multi-sentence narratives, and the other continues my work with Daniel on coherence inferences within single clauses. Now, I’m in my third and final year of the fellowship, and will soon be moving back to California to take up an assistant professor position at Pomona College.
How has your research focus evolved since you graduated from UCSC?
In my time at UCSC, I was heavily involved in the Zapotec Language Project and Nido de Lenguas. Sadly, I’ve had to set those aside since I’ve been in Oxford, but the most exciting thing about my upcoming move to Pomona is that I’ll be able to rejoin those collaborations, and hopefully start related community-engaged projects in southern California.
On the discourse front, I’ve been working extensively on clause-internal coherence, which is a phenomenon I hadn’t thought about as a student. Most work on coherence is about cross-clausal relationships, such as the causal inference that connects, “The child was drenched. She’d been hit by a big water balloon.” In my initial project with Daniel, and our subsequent ongoing collaboration with Hannah Rohde (University of Edinburgh), we’re investigating coherence inferences in single clauses like, “The drenched child got hit by a big water balloon.” So far, we have offline evidence that adjectives and nouns can contribute to clause-internal coherence. As for online evidence, it’s still early days, but we have promising evidence from the Maze task that the processing of clause-internal coherence parallels that of cross-clausal coherence.
I’ve also been working with one of my UCSC cohort-mates and academic siblings, Tom Roberts (Utrecht University) on embedded exclamatives (e.g., “Mabel imagined what a beautiful garden she would have at her new house.”). This grew out of Tom’s enduring interest in clause-embedding predicates and my frustrated—but apparently also enduring—interest in exclamatives, which began with my early graduate work on Hawai’i Creole. Changing the focus from root exclamatives to embedded ones has been illuminating, even looking only at English. We’re just about ready to enter the crosslinguistic phase of the project, which we’re both very much looking forward to.
Reflecting on your transition from graduate student to a postdoc, what were some of the challenges you faced, and how did you navigate them?
I think the biggest challenge for me was feeling isolated, especially with respect to the linguistics community here. I don’t mean that the community here is unfriendly—all the linguists I’ve met here are lovely. The challenge is meeting the other linguists in the first place, because we’re geographically dispersed amongst the various Oxford colleges. Also, due to a couple of visa-related mishaps, I missed some early opportunities to meet the other postdocs and early career people. Luckily, over the last two years the postdoc reps have organized a bunch of events for us, and I’ve been extremely glad to have a community of peers again.
Another major challenge for me was focusing entirely on research for the first time. In Santa Cruz, I always had TA responsibilities to distract me from/help me get around the impostery feelings I often get about my research. Not teaching during my first year in Oxford freed up a lot of crucial time for research and job applications, but I felt a bit unmoored without it. Since then, I’ve regularly taken on undergrad teaching, which I really enjoy, and which definitely helped me on the job market this past cycle.
What has been the most rewarding aspect of your academic career so far, particularly in terms of your research contributions?
I touched on this above, but my work with the Zapotec Language Project and Nido de Lenguas has been the most rewarding part of my career as a linguist so far. I’ve gotten to collaborate with a lot of inspiring people in the course of this work, and to do a lot of things—starting a Santiago Laxopa Zapotec dictionary, running field psycholinguistics studies, putting on community workshops—that I’m really proud of.
Returning to my discourse work, right now I’m very excited that our clause-internal coherence Maze study worked! Our offline studies suggested that speakers found those inferences weaker than their cross-clausal counterparts, and the prompts explicitly provided the interpretations of interest. Our Maze results suggest that clause-internal coherence can play a role in online processing, without us overtly drawing speakers’ attention to it.
I’m also really happy to be collaborating with another of my academic siblings, Jack Duff, along with Daniel on a project investigating potential discourse garden-path effects. He’s written to WHASC about this project, so I won’t repeat what he’s said. I will add that, in my dissertation, I noted that formal discourse theory and psycholinguistic theory historically haven’t communicated with one another very much, and did what I could at the time to at least get them in the same room together. The reward and the continuing promise of this project for me is that it makes big strides in bringing those theories together.
Over spring break, linguistics students and faculty were busy presenting posters and talks across the globe:
