Category: Alumni News

WILLIS TO UC SANTA BARBARA

Congrats to Alum Chloe Willis (B.A. 2014) who just started a Ph.D. in Linguistics at UC Santa Barbara this fall. She is primarily interested in sociolinguistics, especially how sexuality and gender interact with language, as well as issues regarding language and power. After her formative experiences at UCSC, she spent two years in Japan where she volunteered for TELL, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing support and counseling services to the international community, and teaching English as a second language. She is excited for this new chapter in her life!

RESS RECOMMENDS SLP

Alum Lindsay Ress reports on success and opportunities in Speech Language Pathology:

I graduated in 2013 with my BA in Linguistics at UCSC and then took a year off to figure out what I wanted to do next. During undergrad, I interned with a speech language pathologist (SLP) in Santa Cruz. I fell in love with this career. It was a perfect mix of working with people and using knowledge of speech and language. I applied to a few grad programs for speech and language pathology and went to San Jose State University for the 3-year extended masters. It’s typically a 2-year program, but because I have a BA in a different field, I was in the 3-year program. I graduated in May of this year and am currently working at a pediatric therapy center, then starting in a school district this fall, both as an official SLP. For anyone interested in working with people on difficulties with speech and language, I’d suggest looking more into this field and possibly doing some volunteering. It’s always fun, interesting, and currently very in demand – there is no shortage of jobs (and pays well too)!

POLIĆ RECEIVES OUTSTANDING STAFF AWARD

This year’s UCSC Outstanding Staff Award goes to Irena Polić, managing director of UCSC’s Institute for Humanities Research. Irena has long been a major part of our department, both as a student (BA 2001, MA 2003) and for her countless hours of work connecting linguists to the many opportunities afforded by the IHR, which supports much of the work done by students and faculty alike. Read more about Irena’s journey, and why she believes the humanities still play a vitally important role in our society, here.

ANAND AT SALT

This past weekend, Pranav Anand was at the University of Maryland for the 27th edition of Semantics and Linguistic Theory as one of the invited speakers, giving a delightfully-titled talk on “Facts, alternatives, and alternative facts”. Pranav had these non-alternative facts to say about the experience:

“This edition of SALT was extremely well organized. It also included the first ever most distinguished pre-tenure paper award, which went to Ryan Bochnak (grandalum of the department) for a paper on sequence of tense in Washo, a language with optional tense. The sessions were thematically tight, but the program was expansive, with talks and posters in formal and experimental pragmatics as well as formal semantics. Included in that mix was a provocative co-authored poster by alum Kyle Rawlins on the pragmatic components of questions, and rhetorical questions in particular and an extremely convincing co-authored poster by alum Marcin Morzycki on degree modifiers. There was a palpable focus on lesser-studied languages as well. Alum Scott AnderBois delivered a lovely talk on the interaction of reportative evidentials and imperatives in Tagalog and Yucatec. The invited talks were by Maribel Romero, Sarah Murray, and alum Chris Barker, who argued that NPI licensing should be viewed as governed by a scopal economy condition. For my part, I tried to give the new local speciality of fake facts a respectable semantics.”

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