Category: Alumni News

Summer dissertations defended

Four PhD students defended their dissertations at the end of spring quarter or over the summer:

  • Andrew Hedding: “How to move a focus: The syntax of alternative particles” (June 7)
  • Benjamin Eischens: “Tone, phonation, and the phonology-phonetics interface in San Martín Peras Mixtec” (June 8)
  • Nick van Handel: “The sound of silence: Investigations of implicit prosody” (June 30)
  • Andrew Angeles: “Recursivity, prosodic adjunction, and the role of informativeness in Kansai Japanese compound nouns” (August 25)

Congratulations to all four, and best of luck in your future pursuits!

Vincent, Sichel, and Wagers in Languages

An update from Jake Vincent:

Ivy, Matt, and I had an article published in Languages recently (May 11). It’s based on the experimental work on English relative clauses (RCs) that started with my second QP and culminated in my dissertation. It presents experimental evidence that non-presuppositional environments affect a relative clause’s resistance to extraction even in English. In particular, (a) RCs inside of DPs serving as non-verbal predicates of a clause and RCs inside the nominal pivot of a there-existential give rise to a substantially reduced island effect (compared to extraction from a transitive object), and (b) RCs inside of transitive objects may give rise to a reduced island effect when the transitive verb is used in an existential way. The paper also describes what we believe to be a methodological innovation somewhat akin to priming by which the effects of discourse context on sentence acceptability can be measured without modifying the nature of the judgment task.

Congrats, Jake, Matt, and Ivy!

LURC 2022

Today marks the annual meeting of the Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC). This year’s lineup featured four excellent talks by our undergraduates: (1) Animacy in Globally Ambiguous Sentences, by Briana Bugarin, Jackson Confer, Joyce Hong, Owen O’Brien, and Isabel Pacheco, (2) Local Syntactic Coherence Effects across Lexical Categories, by Sarah Lee, Sadira Lewis, Haley Okumura, (3) T-Glottalization in Utahn English, by Kim Tan, and (4) English Inversion and the EPP, by Emilio Gonzalez. All of this was followed up by another talk by distinguished alum Eric Baković: Vowel Harmony Functions, Complexity, and Interactions. The conference was a great success, and WHASC extends a congratulations and a thank you to everyone who organized and/or participated in this event. The full details can be found here.

NSF Postdoc for Pizarro-Guevara

Alumnus Jed Sam Pizarro Guevara (PhD, 2020) has been awarded an NSF SBE Postdoctoral Fellowship. Under the sponsorship of Brian Dillon (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), he will carry out a 2-year research project on the processing of reflexive pronouns in Tagalog. He will be deploying a series of visual world experiments to investigate the extent to which structural information (e.g., c-command and locality relations) and semantic information (e.g., thematic relations) are leveraged to guide the real-time interpretation of reflexives in the language. Over the course of this project, he will be working with scholars at UMass and the University of the Philippines, Diliman.

NIH Postdoc for Adam Morgan

Adam Morgan (MA, 2013) has been awarded an F32 Individual Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers from the NIH. Adam is currently a postdoctoral scholar at NYU School of Medicine. His project will use ECoG (neurosurgical electrocorticography) to map networks of lexical activation and detect neural population synchrony involved in the production of syntax. Congratulations, Adam!

Slugs at the LSA

Many past and present UCSC linguists will be presenting at the up-coming Annual Meeting of the LSA (6-9, January 2022). In chronological order:

Friday (January 7)

D-linking and the effects of contextual set restriction (poster session)

Yuki Seo^^ (University of Delaware) & Rebecca Tollan (University of Delaware)
^^UCSC exchange undergrad from Japan, 2016-17^^

The Development of Vowel Length as a Subphonemic Cue (in-person presentation)

Abigail Fergus (College of William and Mary), Kaitlyn Harrigan (College of William and Mary), & Anya Hogoboom** (College of William and Mary)
**PhD Alum**

Saturday (January 8)

The Irreducible Uncertainty of Ranking and Ordering (poster session)

Eric Bakovic^^ (University of California, San Diego) & Jason Riggle^% (University of Chicago)
^^UCSC BA^^ and %%MA%%

Pre-nominal mí in San Martín Peras Mixtec (poster session)

Lisa Hofmann~~ (University of California, Santa Cruz) & Jason Ostrove** (University of California, Santa Cruz)
~~Current PhD student~~ and **PhD Alum**

Competence meets performance: New perspectives on information structure (hybrid presentation)

Andrew Hedding~~ (University of California, Santa Cruz) & Morwenna Hoeks~~ (University of California, Santa Cruz)
~~Current PhD students~~

Congrats to Vera Gribanova (Ph.D. ’10) for winning the C. L. Baker Award!

More alum accolades at the LSA!

It was announced by the LSA on November 2nd that UCSC alumna Vera Gribanova is to be honored at the 2022 Winter Meeting as the second winner of the C. L. Baker Award. This award recognizes excellence in research in the area of syntactic theory on the part of a scholar who is at the mid-point of a distinguished career. Vera was recognized for her work on the interactions among word-formation, ellipsis, and head-movement, for the sophistication of her work on Russian, and for pioneering investigations of Uzbek (an under-studied language of the Turkic family).

Vera earned the PhD at Santa Cruz in 2010 and has been in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford since the Fall of that year. She was tenured at Stanford in 2018.

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