Category: Alumni News

Slugs’ post-grad plans

M.A. student Duygu Demiray accepted an offer to join the Linguistics Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (UMass) to pursue their Ph.D. study.

Max Xie (B.A. 2024) will continue his studies at San Francisco State University in the MA program in English: Concentration in Linguistics.

Colin Hirschberg (B.A. 2023) accepted an offer from Rutgers University to pursue a Ph.D. in Linguistics.

Ashley Ippolito (B.A. 2022) will be joining the Fall 2024 cohort of doctoral students at Florida State for their upcoming Triple L doctoral leadership grant project researching language and literacy development with an emphasis on multilingual learners with the first cohort project focused on Morphological Awareness Pathway to Reading (MAP-R).

Many congrats, and wishing all the graduating slugs the best in their future endeavors!

Successful LURC 2024

On June 7, the annual Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) took place at the London Nelson Center in downtown Santa Cruz. LURC showcases a variety of linguistic research by UCSC undergraduates majoring in Language Studies and Linguistics.

This year’s LURC features nine posters:

  • Monique Aingworth, Julia Helmer, Grace Nighswonger: The impact of coordination ambiguity on garden path sentences
  • Amenia Denson: Mixed directionality in A’ingae nasal spreading
  • Samuel Almer: Pre-nasal raising patterns in California English
  • Killian Kiuttu: Color harmony in Dolgan
  • Amanda Pollem, E.Z. Dashiell, Jennifer Hernandez, Jordy Chanon, Valen Munson: Specificity and constraint in word prediction
  • Cal Boye-Lynn: Chasing phantoms of auditory bias
  • Andrew Kato: Restricting the scope of a relative measure
  • Millie Hacker: The gradual deletion hypothesis: Evidence from variable denasalization in Hixkaryana
  • Benjamin Sommer, Samuel Almer, Michael Proctor (Macquarie University), Rachel Walker (Faculty): Annotating acoustic speech data with MATLAB tools

This year’s distinguished alumni speaker is Prof. Kirby Conrod (BA, 2011, now Assistant Prof. at Swarthmore College), who gave a talk titled “Pronoun Euphoria”.

Congrats to everyone on their achievement, and thank you to all the faculty and volunteers who contributed to organizing the conference!

  • Prof Matt Wagers giving an opening speech as the department chair

Morimoto to Chuo University

Ph.D. alumna (2020) Maho Morimoto recently joined the Faculty of Commerce at Chuo University as an assistant professor.  She will teach English to business, accounting, marketing, and banking students.

From Maho:

Chuo University’s campus is located in the suburb of Tokyo right next to a zoo and is built on a hill, which reminds me a little of the UCSC campus. I will continue my research collaboration with the Speech Communication lab at Sophia University, where I worked for 2 years as a postdoc. If you ever have a chance to visit Tokyo, let me know and we can go on a little nice hike in Mt. Takao!

Many congrats, Maho!

Another successful LASC in the book

On March 11, the Department hosted its annual Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference, attended by prospective graduate students, current students, faculty, and alumni. The program included presentations by three graduate students and alumnus Eric Potsdam (PhD, 1996), now Professor at University of Florida.

The student presentations showcased recent research going on in the department, featuring:

  • Eli Sharf (3rd-year): “Restrictive Modifiers in Parenthetical Positions”
  • Elifnur Ulusoy (3rd-year): “Effects of Hierarchical Structure in Agreement Attraction: Evidence from Turkish”
  • Maya Wax Cavallaro (5th-year): “The Syllable in Domain Generalization: Evidence from Artificial Language Learning”

The Distinguished Alumnus Lecture given by Eric is on “Exceptives, Ellipsis, and Negation“.

Thank you to all of the students, staff, and faculty who contributed to making this event a success!

  • LASC presenters (left-right): Elifnur Ulusoy, Maya Wax Cavallaro, Eli Sharf, Eric Potsdam

Slugs at UIUC

Undergraduate student Andrew Kato recently gave a talk at ILLS 16 (the Annual Meeting of the Illinois Language & Linguistics Society) titled “The scope-taking of relative measurements” hosted at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (March 1-2). Among the keynote speakers was alum Ruth Kramer (Ph.D. 2009), whose plenary talk was titled “The case against phonological gender assignment: Crosslinguistic evidence from Hausa, Guébie and beyond”.

Slugs at Centennial LSA Meeting

UCSC Linguistics was well-represented at the centennial Linguistics Society of America meeting that took place in the heart of New York, NY, from Jan 4-7.

Poster-wise, fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Yaqing Cao presented a poster on “Modals and negations LF-PF (mis)matches in English and Mandarin” and second-year Ph.D. student Richard Wang presented a poster on “Distribution of neutral tone and retroflex lenition in Beijing Mandarin“.

Also in attendance were Profs. Matt Wagers and Maziar Toosarvandani, Robert Henderson (U. of Arizona, Ph.D. 2012), Caroline Andrews (U. of Zurich, B.A. 2011), Maura O’Leary (Swarthmore College, B.A. 2013).

  • UCSC Gathering (from left to right): Caroline Andrews, Maura O'Leary, Robert Henderson, Dan Brodkin, Yaqing Cao, Maziar Toosarvandani, Matt Wagers, Ruoqing Yao, Richard Wang
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