Category: Alumni News

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.

Lisa Hofmann and Adrian Brasoveanu

The WHASC Editors recently got a chance to catch up with Lisa Hofmann, who received her PhD from the department in 2022. Her dissertation, advised by Professor Adrian Brasoveanu, was entitled “Anaphora and Negation“. Since graduating, Lisa has been a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart, working with Professor Judith Tonhauser’s group, where Lisa continues to pursue her research on issues related to formal semantics, pragmatics, syntax, and psycholinguistics.

What is your research about?

Recently, I published an article in Semantics and Pragmatics about how pronominal anaphora is constrained by negation and non-veridical operators. That work grew out of my dissertation, which investigated the interaction of Anaphora and Negation, and how anaphoric dependencies are interpreted in hypothetical and counterfactual discourse.

Expanding on the themes of my dissertation, I investigate how discourse dependencies—things like anaphora, presupposition, and ellipsis—interact with logical properties of linguistic expressions. I hope that this can contribute to better understanding how language users combine multiple sources of information—situational context, prior discourse, literal content—into a single representation of meaning.

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

When I graduated from UC Santa Cruz in early 2022, I had already been living in Germany since mid-2020. The move let me be closer to family during the pandemic and escape the Santa Cruz rent burden, but it also meant I had fewer day-to-day touchpoints with the UCSC environment. Finishing my degree remotely, I almost decided not to apply for academic positions at all—I kept hearing about how tough the academic job market was, and the uncertainty of the pandemic made it hard to see a path forward.

It was a former mentor, Daniel Altshuler, who reignited my motivation by advertising a postdoc position at Oxford. This one excited me, because I had a personal connection, and I like his work on discourse interpretation. Although I didn’t get that post (it was a much better match for fellow UCSC alumn Kelsey Sasaki), the process got me back in the right mindset: I realized I did still love doing research, and it was worth a shot. From there, I applied to a few more postdocs. I was rejected in Singapore but ended up receiving an offer from the University of Stuttgart to work with Judith Tonhauser, where I am very happy now.

When applying to postdoc positions, I think it really helps to look for that spark of excitement—whether it’s a personal connection to someone whose work you already admire, which motivated me to apply to Daniel Altshuler’s position, or a strong alignment of research goals, like I found in Stuttgart. Judith Tonhauser is an exceptional mentor, open to a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches. This fits perfectly with my interest in bridging formal semantics and experimental work, and helped me to bring my research on discourse interpretation to the next level.

What new research projects have you started since graduating?

Collaborating with Judith Tonhauser, who is an expert on experimental research on presuppositions, has been the perfect opportunity to investigate the logic of discourse interpretation in new ways. In one experimental project with her and Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, we investigated how the presupposed content of clause-embedding predicates (like discover or know) behaves under different entailment-canceling operators (negation, questions, conditionals…). Our findings were fascinating: the differences between these predicates shifted when testing them in these different contexts. These results challenge standard accounts and might push us to refine how we represent the interplay between lexical semantics, sentential operators, and pragmatic inference.

It’s a subtle phenomenon, but experimentally uncovering the nuances helps us see how grammar and pragmatics work together to guide interpretation. For example, it helped me with my goal—rooted in my dissertation on anaphora and negation—to develop a formally rigorous model of presupposition projection in counterfactual discourse. There were certain logical issues which I was only able to address by incorporating insights from empirical work showing subtle pragmatic modulation. Specifically, integrating QUD-partitions of context sets gave me a basic mechanism that finally worked. While there is still much to figure out in capturing the nuances more accurately, this research contributes to a more unified theory of how our linguistic knowledge interacts with broader pragmatic reasoning.

Where do you see your research heading in the future?

I have begun thinking more seriously about how formal semantic theories of discourse interpretation (like dynamic semantics) connect with cognitively plausible models of mental meaning representations. My doctoral advisor, Adrian Brasoveanu, has led the way by embedding formal theories in cognitive architectures such as ACT-R and using Bayesian methods to fit those models to psycholinguistic data. My hope is to keep bridging those theoretical and empirical approaches so that our theories of meaning can be both mathematically explicit and deeply informed by how people actually process language.

I recently began collaborating with Morwenna Hoeks, another fellow UCSC alumn, who is a psycholinguist and semanticist. We humans handle referents in hypothetical or counterfactual discourse. For example, if we say something like “Mary doesn’t have a dog, so at least she doesn’t have to walk it,” do we temporarily imagine a dog anyway when we process that pronoun it? We’re hoping to run experimental studies that tie directly into dynamic semantic models, testing how quickly people update their mental representation of discourse as soon as they hit a negation or hypothetical cue.

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

First, be sure you truly want it. Academic life is really special and can be incredibly rewarding: we’re paid to research what fascinates us, teach bright students, and we get to exchange ideas with brilliant and interesting colleagues from all over the world. But it isn’t always as romantic as it sounds: it’s highly competitive, can be isolating, and the stress around funding and publication demands can be emotionally draining. If you’re confident you love the work, that can really help sustain you.

Second, you may have heard this many times, but, learn to say no. Receiving requests and invitations can be very flattering, especially in early career stages. But it’s important to insist on clear communication about what exactly is requested of you, and to pause and double check with yourself if you actually have capacities, and whether you see some benefit or obligation there.

Finally, if you’re considering working in another country, look into the administrative rules early. When I started my job in Germany, I learned that the pay level was based on how many years I had already worked in a qualified role, since earning an MA degree. I hadn’t previously fully sorted my MA paperwork because I was focused on my PhD, so I had to do some scrambling to prove that I had fulfilled those requirements. More broadly, it taught me to reach out to people already in the system—colleagues can offer invaluable tips about contract lengths, salary scales, and other quirks that you’d otherwise find out too late.