Category: Alumni News

Dave Teeple (Ph.D. 2009) is happily employed as a Linguist at Nuance Communications (makers of Dragon Natually Speaking software, among other things), in the Creative Development department. Dave writes: I’m helping to design text-to-speech systems for clients who shall remain unnamed. This involves, among other tasks, pursuing research related to improving pitch contour synthesis, so that one day HAL will say, as naturally as any human, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” At that point, Dave will be superfluous, and HAL will start engineering humans to talk more like it does. Until it too becomes superfluous and is discarded. At some point they hope to have brought these mutual improvements to the point where a single highly expressive hand gesture will suffice for all human-computer communications.

Tami Schuyler graduated from the MA Program in Linguistics at UCSC in 2001. Her much-cited MA thesis (Wh-Movement out of the Site of VP Ellipsis) was a study of the interaction among movement, focus, and ellipsis. Since graduating, Tami has made a career using her linguistic training at H5 in San Francisco. For the past year or two, however, she has returned to an old calling and been engaged in creative writing. Tami recently achieved a significant breakthrough in having her first story accepted for publication. The story (provisionally titled Ugly) will appear in February in the Cutbank Literary Magazine, a well regarded journal associated with the creative writing program at the University of Montana.

Robert Henderson successfully defended his dissertation titled “Ways of Pluralizing Events” on July 12, 2012. A few weeks later, Robert joined Lisa Travis and Jessica Coon at McGill University as a post-doctoral researcher. We are sad to see him leave the ranks of our graduate students. But we are happy to see him join the ranks of our alumni, and we look forward to hearing about his accomplishments

Congratulations also to Taylor Bell, who passed her MA thesis defense with a paper called “The (In)visibility of Adjunction Hosts in the Syntax”. The committee was Jim McCloskey (chair) and Jorge Hankamer.