Category: Alumni News

AN ALUM TELLS US WHAT HE HAS BEEN DOING

Alum Devin Tankersley (BA, 2011) provides this long-distance update about his MA-work in Taiwan:

I am in my 3rd and final year as MA student of the Institute of Linguistics at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, currently working on my thesis, a study of the overt pronoun constraint in L1 and L2 Taiwan Sign Language. The program has a strong emphasis on analysis and understanding formal theory, so I am grateful for my training at UCSC, which prepared me for independently seeking out research topics, writing clear and concise argumentation, and deep discussions on various topics. My research interests broadly include syntax-phonology interactions, formal approaches to tone sandhi and tone neutralization, and grammatical description of under-documented languages, including sign languages. I intend to continue on to a PhD in the future, with the goal of making linguistic study more accessible to speakers of endangered and minority languages, as well as making topics in sign language linguistics more mainstream and prominent in the field.

RE: …

Pranav Anand and LRC visitor Dan Hardt traveled to Austin last week to deliver a paper on automatically detecting the antecedents of sluices at Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2016. The conference was replete with UCSC alums: Chis Potts (PhD, 2003) delivered a keynote address on his ongoing work on pragmatic reasoning at scale and Aaron White (BA, 2009) and Kyle Rawlins (PhD, 2008) presented work from their group at JHU on building a large-scale dataset of protorole judgments in a dependency-bank.

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The Department’s ellipsis consortium continues to ride the waves of UCSC’s publicity. ‘Why don’t we say what we mean?‘, the article highlighted on the cover of the Fall 2016 issue of UC Santa Cruz Magazine, focuses on Pranav Anand and Jim McCloskey‘s research on sluicing as well as the strong presence of our alumni in Silicon Valley. Among the alums mentioned: Rachelle Boyson, Brianna Kaufman, Jesse Saba Kirchner, and Clara Sherley-Appel.

A NATURAL JOB, PHONETICALLY SPEAKING

Recent alumna Anna Greenwood has just started work at Google, and has this report of her first week at the ‘plex:

On Monday (10/24), I started my new job at Google (Mountain View) as a Program Manager for the Speech team. I’m working on the same team as alums Jeremy O’Brien and Eileen O’Neill, and I’m on the same campus as Clara Sherley-Appel and Jesse Saba Kirchner (and more UCSC linguists I don’t know yet). The first week has been both unbelievably exciting and stressful with information overload, but I’m psyched to be working there with awesome, dedicated, intelligent, supportive people.

In related news, we have this report from alumna Brianna Kaufman about our alums in Google Venice (where Karl DeVries decamped to at the beginning of this month) and another synergy:

We’re continuing the Slug Linguist tradition of living close to the beach, drinking way too much coffee, and taking any excuse to procrastinate and go watch an indie movie, and we’re continuing the czar(ina) tradition of filling the LA office printers with paper when needed. Come visit us down in LA where the rent is relatively cheap compared to other large cities and where the cold-pressed juice is plentiful!

After some discussion, we realized that all three of the computer czar(ina)s from 2011-2013 are now Analytical Linguists in the LA office together. (Note: there should be some kind of study done, because if I recall correctly Jeremy O’Brien and Jesse Saba-Kirchner were also computer czars.)

ADLER & SMITH @ AMP

As semanticists migrate northward in preparations for winter, phonologists will be heading south. Graduate student Jeff Adler will be presenting two posters at the 2016 Annual Meeting in Phonology Conference (AMP), at USC: “The moraic trochee in the Mohawk stress-epenthesis interactions”, based on his QP last year and, alongside Jesse Zymet from UCLA, “Irreducible parallelism in process interactions”, which extends the claims of Adler’s QP, both cross-linguistically and theoretically. Visiting faculty Brian Smith will be presenting the poster “Emergent idiosyncrasy in English comparatives” with UConn’s Claire Moore-Cantwell.

Speakers at the conference include alum Ryan Bennett, who is delivering the co-authored talk on Kaqchikel entitled “Against phonetic realism as the source of root co-occurrence restrictions”, and other poster presenters include former visitors Adam Albright and Lev Blumenfeld, and alum Andy Wedel.

WE HOLD THESE LINGUISTIC TRUTHS TO BE LEGALLY RELEVANT

On October 5th, alum Jason Merchant delivered a University of Chicago Harper Lecture for UChicago friends and alumni in New York City. Jason spoke about his interdisciplinary project “Historical Semantics and Legal Interpretation” with UChicago law professor Alison LaCroix. Their aim is to enrich contemporary textual analysis in law with insights from theoretical linguistic analysis and large-scale historical corpus analysis, to precisely investigate the syntactic and semantic distributions of important legal terms throughout history in order to understand the use of such terms both at a law’s enactment and as language changed.

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