Category: Alumni News

SANTA CRUCIANS AT BLS

The 42nd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS) will take place this weekend (February 5-7) with a parasession on Austronesian linguistics and a special session on learnability. Graduate student Anna Greenwood will give a talk Friday afternoon (February 5) entitled “Phonetic naturalness is driven by channel bias: Evidence from final devoicing”, while LRC Visitor Eric Rosen will present Saturday afternoon (February 6) on “Predicting the unpredictable: Capturing the apparent semiregularity of rendaku voicing in Japanese through Gradient Symbolic Computation.”

In addition, UCSC alumnus Joey Sabbagh (BA 2000; UT Arlington) is an invited speaker at BLS this year, giving a plenary address entitled “Syntactic and prosodic adjunction in Tagalog” at 12 pm on Saturday (February 6). Other alumni in attendance include Jason Merchant (Chicago) and Eric Potsdam (Florida).

CLOTHIER-GOLDSCHMIDT MOVING ON

Alumna Scarlett Clothier-Goldschmidt (BA 2014, MA 2015) has accepted a position as Research Coordinator at Cogito, a venture-backed technology company in Boston. She writes:

I’m very excited about it because I consider myself a psycholinguist and it’s exciting to find a job that actually applies the skills that I cultivated in my time at UCSC. I’ve always thought that there could be really interesting and useful applications for some of the paradigms we use in psycholinguistics in other areas, but it’s rare to find a company that is looking for someone with this kind of experience. For my interview I gave a version of my LASC presentation (with Chelsea Miller’s help editing my handout to make it accessible for non-linguists), and I was really surprised how well people followed along and the level of discussion that it generated.

Congratulations, Scarlett, and the best of luck in your new job!

MCCLOSKEY TRAVELS TO LEIDEN

While Sandy Chung and Matt Wagers flew to the Middle East last weekend, Jim McCloskey travelled less far — to the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Jim took part in a Workshop on Ellipsis Licensing beyond Syntax, which focused especially on the role of prosody in shaping ellipsis phenomena. Co-organized by Lisa Cheng, Anikó Liptak, and former LRC visitor Güliz Güneş, the workshop featured talks by Chris Tancredi, Andrew Weir, Volker Struckmeier, Anikó Liptak, Shin Ishihara, and Hubert Truckenbrodt. Jim presented recent joint work with Emily Elfner and alumnus Ryan Bennett. Former LRC visitor Luis Vicente was also an active participant and commentator at the event. Handouts and slides are available here.

On a side trip to Den Hag on the day following the workshop, Jim had the great good fortune to discover the ideal lunch-spot and resting place for the weary syntactician trying to un-ravel the mysteries of phasehood. The following day and more or less by accident, the three Santa Crucians (Jim, Matt, and Sandy) met in Schiphol airport at the departure gate for the long flight home from Amsterdam to SFO.

ALUMNA INTERVIEW: LOTUS GOLDBERG

After hearing about the Linguistics and Computational Linguistics Program at Brandeis, the WHASC Editors had a chance to sit down with UCSC alumna Lotus Goldberg (BA 1993, MA 1998), who received her PhD from McGill University in 2005 and is currently Associate Professor at Brandeis.

WHASC: How have you been involved in Linguistics and Computational Linguistics at Brandeis?

Lotus: When I came to Brandeis in 2005, it was to work in the undergraduate Linguistics Program here, which is (and was) just focused on theoretical linguistics. James Pustejovsky, who is now the Chair both of the undergrad program and our Computational Linguistics (CL) MA Program, was here in the Computer Science Department and had PhD students doing CL with him. A couple of years later, he had the idea of starting an MA program focusing on CL that would take students who hadn’t necessarily studied Computer Science (CS) as undergraduates.

Continue Reading ALUMNA INTERVIEW: LOTUS GOLDBERG

REPORT FROM LSA

Linguists from UCSC were well represented at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Washington, DC. There were several grad students who presented papers: Lauren McGarry, Jason Ostrove, Bern Samko, and Erik Zyman. Many alumni of the department were also in attendance, including Pete Alrenga (BU), Eric Bakovic (UCSD), Boris Harizanov (Stanford), Ruth Kramer (Georgetown), Nick LaCara (UMass Amherst), Eric Potsdam (Florida), and Matt Tucker (NYU), among others. (Apologies if you were not mentioned!)

ALUMNA INTERVIEW: RACHELLE BOYSON

WHASC recently interviewed Rachelle Boyson (B.A. 2015), who graduated with honors in Linguistics, about life after graduation.

WHASC: What have you been doing since graduation (Spring 2015)?

Rachelle: I spent April through July in Santa Cruz, working on the sluicing project with Jim and Pranav and generally treating myself to some time off (it’s amazing what kind of “soul searching” gets done when there are no scholarly/professional obligations). I did some job hunting in July, but got more serious about it once I moved back home to the Bay Area in August. Since moving home I’ve job hunted and done a lot of wine tasting…and now I’m working at Yahoo!
Continue Reading ALUMNA INTERVIEW: RACHELLE BOYSON

ALUMNUS REPORT: NICHOLAS ILACQUA

Nicholas Ilacqua (B.A. 2002), who graduated with a double major in Linguistics and Philosophy, is now working at UC Davis. He sent in this update:

I’m starting a lead java developer position for the Vet School at UC Davis, re-architecting their internal systems. Though I didn’t go further into Linguistics, the training I had at UCSC has made me a much better engineer, in particular being able to analyze a problem more completely instead of just regurgitating a forum post. Also, this round of job hunting people were to my surprise trying to fit me into more lead positions. Based on questions asked, I think part of it was because I do have a background other than just Computer Science.

If you’d like to get in touch with Nicholas, contact WHASC for his e-address.

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