Category: Alumni News

Syntax & Semantics at Santa Cruz, Volume 5 released

SynSem at UCSC Vol 5

The cover of Volume V of Syntax & Semantics at Santa Cruz

The fifth volume of Syntax & Semantics at Santa Cruz (SASC) — the Department’s working paper series on syntax and semantics — was just released. Edited by PhD students Lalitha Balachandran and Jack Duff, it features four articles by current and recently graduated students and faculty:

The volume is available both online and in print.

John Rickford to give Stevenson College Distinguished Alumni Lecture

Professor John R. Rickford

Professor John R. Rickford

John R. Rickford, who is J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities at Stanford University, will give a Stevenson College Distinguished Alumni Lecture on Wednesday, October 19 at 3:00-4:30 pm in the Fireside Lounge. He will be speaking about his autobiography Speaking My Soul: Race, Life and Language. The lecture, which is co-sponsored by the Department of Linguistics, will be followed by a reception and book signing outside on the patio. 

Professor Rickford received his BA in sociolinguistics at UC Santa Cruz in 1971, with highest academic honors and honors from Stevenson College. He has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1980. Professor Rickford’s research has been recognized by an American Book Award, a Language and the Public Award from the Linguistic Association of America, and the Best Paper in Language Award, among other honors. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017 and was President of the Linguistic Society of America in 2015.

The Department of Linguistics maintains the John Rickford Undergraduate Development Fund to recognize his “distinguished intellectual achievements and for his unstinting commitment to marginalized communities and the languages that they speak.” The Fund provides new academic opportunities for distinguished undergraduates by supporting research projects, travel to conferences, and undergraduate linguistics club activities.

Contributions to the Rickford Fund can be made directly online or by mail.

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!

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