Category: Alumni News

WCCFL 41 takes place at UC Santa Cruz

This past weekend (May 5-7) saw over 125 linguists from around the world convene in and around Stevenson College for the 41st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 41). They presented 42 talks and 39 posters, on a wide range of topics in theoretical phonology, syntax, and semantics. Two special sessions brought together specialists on phi-features and deixis and anaphora; one virtual poster session enabled presenters not able to attend in person to participate; three invited speakers gave plenary talks on social gender and nominal structure, locality at the morphology-phonology interface, and demonstrative expressions.

The photo gallery below captures the lively spirit of the conference, which featured a conference dinner and other social events, alongside the talks and posters. For some attendees, the conference ended in a visit to the giant redwoods at Henry Cowell State Park, where a special session on “root structure” was held (video courtesy of fourth year PhD student Dan Brodkin).

In addition to many current faculty and students, alumni Andrew Hedding (PhD, 2022), Aaron Kaplan (PhD, 2008), and Line Mikkelsen (PhD, 2004) were present. Some other past members of the department were also in attendance, but were not captured photographically, including Vera Gribanova (PhD, 2010) and Boris Harizanov (PhD, 2014).

One person appears in only a couple of these photos, because she was behind the camera, fourth-year PhD student Yaqing Cao.

WCCFL 41 was made possible by the generous support of the Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz and the Department of Linguistics, as well as the tremendous dedication and hard work of many linguistics graduate students and LRC Coordinator Maria Zimmer.

Colin Hirschberg receives Dean’s Undergraduate Award

Colin Hirschberg, who received a BA in linguistics in Fall 2022, has been awarded a Dean’s Undergraduate Award for his thesis on “Restrictions on Mandarin bei-passives,” supervised by Professor Jess Law. Only 10 Dean’s Awards, which come with a $100 prize, are made in the Humanities Division each year. 

The WHASC Editor asked Colin to briefly describe what he discovered in his thesis research:

“This thesis examines Mandarin passive sentences, demonstrating that they have an additional requirement not shared with active sentences. Passive verbs must be marked for a change of state, though, this requirement seems to be relaxed when the subject describes a sentient individual, like a human. This work attributes the constraints on passives to a general notion of affectedness. An individual is affected when they undergo a change of state. Sentient individuals can undergo more types of abstract changes of state than non-sentient ones, so despite the ostensibly relaxed affectedness requirement, a passive sentence does express a change of state, just an abstract emotional one rather than a physical one like in. That passive subjects are more constrained by affectedness than the corresponding active objects not only refutes the meaning equivalence between active and passive sentences; this also reaffirms a longstanding observation in linguistics that the subject position is structurally prominent.”

Congratulations, Colin!

Colin Hirschberg

Colin Hirschberg

Banana slug linguists in York

Shayne Sloggett (BA, 2010), currently Experimental Officer in Psycholinguistics in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York, recently hosted fellow banana slug Deniz Rudin (PhD, 2018) in York. Deniz, who is currently Assistant Professor in Linguistics at the University of Southern California, gave a colloquium talk in the department entitled “Whose fault is faultless disagreement?” While there, they had some time to take in the air and culture of the medieval part of the city.

Deniz in York

Professor Deniz Rudin in York, England, a 12th-century church to his right

Andrew Hedding accepts syntax position at UW

andrew hedding

Professor Andrew Hedding

Andrew Hedding (PhD, 2022) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of syntax in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington, starting in fall 2023. Andrew’s dissertation investigated how abstract categories such as focus are represented in grammar, with special attention to the connection between wh-movement and focus movement. It integrated evidence from San Martín Peras Mixtec, an Indigenous language of Oaxaca, speakers of which Andrew has been collaborating with since 2017, in Mexico and California. The dissertation committee was composed of Professors Jess Law, Ivy Sichel, Maziar Toosarvandani (chair), and Michelle Yuan (UC Santa Diego).

Congratulations, Andrew!

Aaron White receives NSF CAREER award

 

Aaron White

Professor Aaron White

Aaron White (BA, 2009), who is currently Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Rochester, just received an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. This prestigious award, which is jointly supported by the Linguistics program and the Robust Intelligence program, will support his work on logical form induction:

This project develops a framework for integrating complex logical reasoning capabilities into the components of AI systems that make their ability to reason by analogy possible. To support the development of this framework, the project builds a large dataset capturing the logical relationships among sentences in three languages by using AI systems to determine which kinds of logical relationships are most useful for improving that system’s own logical reasoning capabilities. Through integration with graduate and undergraduate curricula, the project serves as a vehicle to enhance programming and statistical literacy as well as data collection and data management skills through training with hands-on applications.

The framework integrates logical representations into AI systems by imposing constraints on the sorts of numeric representations that those systems use to make inferences on the basis of some natural language input. These constraints are defined in terms of a mapping from the system’s numeric representations of natural language to logical representations. This mapping is learned from scratch and itself constrained (a) to correctly predict inferences that actual speakers of a language make — as captured by the large-scale datasets collected under the project — and (b) to be compositional: the meaning of some piece of language must be predictable from the meanings of its parts.

Congratulations, Aaron!

Another successful LASC

On March 6, the Department hosted its annual Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference, attended by prospective graduate students and current students, faculty and alumni. The program included presentations by several graduate students and alumna Anya Hogoboom (PhD, 2006), now Associate Professor at the College of William and Mary. 

The student presentations showcased recent research going on in the department, and sparked lively and insightful discussion during the Q & A:

  • Jack Duff led off the presentations with a talk on “Restricted restriction in the relative clauses of Santiago Laxopa Zapotec.”
  • Niko Webster followed with a talk on “Eventive nominals in Korean and the nature of argument structure.”
  • Lalitha Balachandran and Morwenna Hoeks presented a talk entitled “Does memory for focus structure interfere with memory for prosody?”
  • Dan Brodkin concluded the student presentations with his work on “Locality and extraction in Mandar.”

The Distinguished Alumna Speaker was Professor Anya Hogoboom, whose presentation “Making sense of word-final strength and weakness” argued that strong and weak behavior in final syllables is sensitive to word-final lengthening and is dependent on the role of duration in the phonological phenomenon. 

The LASC dinner and celebration that followed, on the lawn at the Cowell Provost House, was marked by delightful conversations, excellent food, and sweeping views of the Monterey Bay. 

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

LASC presenters

LASC presenters pictured from left to right: Dan Brodkin, Jack Duff, Morwenna Hoeks, Lalitha Balachandran, Niko Webster, and Anya Hogoboom.

UCSC Linguists at the 2023 LSA Linguistic Institute

The 2023 LSA Linguistic Institute, “Linguistics as Cognitive Science: Universality and Variation,” will be held June 19-July 14 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Two of the Institute’s courses will be taught by UC Santa Cruz faculty or alumni: Field Psycholinguistics (course 220) will be taught by Professor Matt Wagers and Jed Sam Pizarro-Guevara (PhD, 2020) and Advanced Pragmatics (course 211) will be taught by Maria Biezma and Kyle Rawlins (PhD, 2008).

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