Category: Alumni News

Ito and Mester’s Spring and Summer 2023 updates in Japan

Besides cherry blossom viewing on their bikes at ICU (Picture 1), Research Professor Emerita and Emeritus Junko and Armin worked on finalizing “Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory–Theory and Analysis”, a book co-edited with Nick Kalivoda (Ph.D. 2018) and Jennifer Bellik (Ph.D. 2019). This involved final proofreading, editorial corrections, correspondence with individual authors, and providing the index — bringing it to final publication in the summer.

The volume (Picture 2) contains the results of an NSF-funded project in the form of various singly and co-authored papers by the editors as well as UCSC linguistics undergrads, grads, and postdocs, including Richard Bibbs (7th-year Ph.D. candidate), Dan Brodkin (5th-year Ph.D. candidate), Yaqing Cao (5th-year Ph.D. candidate), Ben Eischens (Ph.D. 2022, now Assistant Professor at UCLA), Ed Shingler (B.A. 2021), Max Tarlov (B.A. 2021) and Nicholas Van Handel (Ph.D. 2022).

During their Spring sojourn in Japan, Junko and Armin had two UCSC-related get-togethers. First, at an Italian trattoria in Tokyo appropriately called “La Mora” (Picture 3), they dined with Haruo Kubozono (visiting scholar at the Linguistics Research Center 1993-94, now at National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, or NINJAL), Maho Morimoto (Ph.D. 2020, now a postdoc at Sophia University in Tokyo), and Motoko Katayama (PhD 1998, now a medical doctor heading her own Obstetrics & Gynecology clinic in Kunitachi, Tokyo).

Second, travels in Japan with Bill Ladusaw (Retired Professor Emeritus) and his partner Ken Christopher landed the four of them at an onsen (hot spring spa) near Nikko, Japan (Picture 4).

  • Cherry blossoms at International Christian University
    Cherry blossoms at International Christian University

AmLaP23 Update

AMLaP23 took place from August 31st to September 2, with many current and former Banana Slugs in attendance. It was hosted by the Basque Center for Brain and Language in San Sebastián-Donostia, whose mountain-hemmed, fog-suffused shores were eerily reminiscent of [Matt’s] home. There were six presentations from current students and faculty:

All of their abstracts can be found here.

We also ran into many former slugs, like Kelsey Sasaki (Ph.D. 2021, now Junior Research Fellow at Oxford; presenting joint work with Matt Husband, Daniel Altshuler and Runyi Yao) and Jakub Dotlačil (Assitant Professor at Utrecht). And Professor Liv Hoversten from Psychology, who completed a postdoc at BCBL, was also present.

From left to right: Kogan, Arvindam, Wagers, Dotlačil, Duff, Kaplan, Rich, Sasaki, Hoversten; not pictured: Balachandran

From left to right: Kogan, Arvindam, Wagers, Dotlačil, Duff, Kaplan, Rich, Sasaki, Hoversten; not pictured: Balachandran

Bennett and Padgett present at ICPhS 2023

In August, at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) in Prague, Ryan Bennett and Jaye Padgett presented a poster called “The timing of secondary dorsal articulations across syllable positions in Irish“. This is joint work with Grant McGuire, Jenny Bellik, and Máire Ní Chiosáin of University College Dublin.

Ryan Bennett had another talk at the same ICPhS called “Phonetic variability in the realization of glottalized stops in Uspanteko (Mayan)” (co-authored with Robert Henderson, UCSC Ph.D. 2012, now Associate Professor at U Arizona, and Meg Harvey, Brown University).

Ph.D. alumna Maho Morimoto (2020) was also present with her joint work with colleagues, one titled “Tongue contours for the Japanese moraic nasal by speakers of Standard Chinese“, and the other “Articulatory timing of the Japanese singleton and geminate /t/ produced by speakers of Standard Chinese“.

Slugs at CreteLing 2023

CreteLing celebrated its fifth anniversary this summer, which took place from July 15 to July 28 in Rethymnon, Greece. 

Professor Ivy Sichel co-taught a class with Karlos Arregui (Professor, University of Chicago) titled “Socio-grammar”, which focused on gender asymmetries and markedness in language and the actual world. And Professor Sichel described her experience at CreteLing as “a perfect balance between intense learning and a laid-back communal atmosphere”.

Professor Roumyana Pancheva co-taught a class on “Comparative Syntax and Semantics of Slavic” with Barbara Citko (Professor, University of Washington) and Sergei Tatevosov (Professor, Moscow State University).

Professor Emerita Donka Farkas co-taught “The Semantics of Mood” with Paul Portner (Professor, Georgetown University).

B.A. alumnus Eric Baković (Professor and Chair at UC San Diego) co-taught “Computation, Learning and Phonological Theory” with Adam Albright (Professor, MIT).

Ph.D. students Yağmur Kiper and Elifnur Ulusoy, M.A. students Duygu Demiray and Larry Lyu, and recent B.A. alumnus Jackson Confer were also in attendance.

  • Professor Ivy Sichel

(Photo credits: CreteLing Summer School Facebook)

Tom Roberts accepts computational linguistics position at Utrecht

Tom Roberts (PhD, 2021) has recently accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics in the Department of Languages, Literature, and Communication at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, starting in November 2023. Tom’s research focuses on the semantics-pragmatics interface, especially of attitude verbs and speech acts, and how these can (and can’t) vary across languages. This won’t be much of a move for Tom, as he has been just down the road from Utrecht as a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam since leaving UCSC, so he will thankfully not have to give up his omafiets (a roadster bike, literally “grandma bike”).

Erik Zyman’s research in the news

Erik Zyman (PhD, 2018), currently Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago, was recently featured in Tableau, the University of Chicago’s humanities magazine. He described his research in syntax:

As a theoretical syntactician, he is interested in “identifying the fundamental operations that build syntactic structure in human language.” One basic operation, which linguists call Merge, combines two words or phrases into a larger unit. Although Merge is fundamental to many versions of generative syntax—an approach according to which grammar is governed by deep laws—Zyman says the operation is difficult to define with precision while both satisfying the relevant conceptual requirements (elegance, simplicity, and others) and accounting for the properties that the relevant syntactic structures have in human language. In a forthcoming article in the journal Syntax, Zyman says he “develops a novel formal definition of Merge that overcomes some drawbacks of previous ones while building on their strengths.”

Zyman aligns himself with a tradition of seeking order beneath complexity: “The second-century Alexandrian syntactician Apollonius Dyscolus was convinced that syntax is fundamentally orderly and rationally comprehensible. Nearly two millennia later, Noam Chomsky, building on a view of Galileo’s, stated that ‘Nature is in fact simple and it’s the task of the scientists to show how that’s the case.’ I agree with both of them.”

Erik Zyman

Professor Erik Zyman (on the right)

Bennett at HISPhonCog

Last week, Professor Ryan Bennett presented a talk at HISPhonCog in Seoul, entitled “Syllable position in secondary dorsal contrasts: an ultrasound study of Irish.” While there, he had the opportunity to catch up with some past and future students in the department. Maho Morimoto (PhD, 2020) also presented at the conference, and incoming PhD student Hanyoung Byun was in attendance as well.

HisPhonCog

Maho Morimoto, Hanyoung Byun, Ryan Bennett (from left to right)

1 2 3 4 5 … 35