Category: Alumni News

Santa Crucians at the LSA Annual Meeting

Picking up a tradition disrupted by the pandemic, current and past members of the Department gathered for the Santa Cruz party at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Denver earlier this month. In attendance on Saturday night, at the lounge atop the conference hotel with sweeping views of the Rocky Mountains, were current faculty Ryan Bennett, Maziar Toosarvandani, and Matt Wagers, joined by graduate alumni Aaron Kaplan (PhD 2008), Chris Kennedy (PhD 1997), and Anissa Zaitsu (BA 2017, MA 2018) and undergraduate alumni Caroline Andrews (BA 2011), Kirby Conrod (BA 2011), Maura O’Leary (BA 2013), and Devin Tankersley (BA 2011).

Also in attendance was a South Bay neighbor, Yining Nie, who recently joined the Department of Linguistics at San José State as an Assistant Professor.

The Santa Cruz party attendees all look forward to reuniting with other members of the UCSC linguistics community at next year’s Annual Meeting in New York.

Slugfest at UCLA

Earlier this quarter, several present and past members of the UC Santa Cruz linguistics community met up at the 2022 American Meeting on Phonology (AMP) at UCLA. The Sunday poster session featured work by current PhD students Dan Brodkin (“Existential Match: Evidence from Mandar”) and Jonathan Paramore (“Toward a uniform moraic quantity principle”), as well as Professor Rachel Walker (“Temporal coordination and markedness in Moenat Ladin consonant clusters,” with Yifan Yang), and the Friday and Saturday sessions saw talks by PhD alumni Aaron Kaplan (“Categorical and gradient constraints on clitic allomorphy,” with Edward Rubin) and Andy Wedel (“The effect of cue-specific lexical competitors on hyperarticulation of VOT and F0 contrasts in Korean stops,” with Cheonkam Jeong) and BA alumnus Eric Bakovic (“Faithfulness and underspecification,” with William Bennett and “SAGUARO: A workbench for phonological theories,” with Eric Meinhardt). The gathering also featured recent PhD alumnus — and now UCLA Assistant Professor — Ben Eischens and first-year grad students Ian Carpick, Duygu Demiray, Larry Lyu, and Richard Wang. A strong showing for the Department, and a memorable event for phonology!

UCSC at AMP 2022

From left: Ben Eischens (PhD Alumnus), Eric Bakovic (BA Alumnus), Dan Brodkin (PhD), Jonathan Paramore (PhD), Rachel Walker (Faculty), Duygu Demiray (MA), Aaron Kaplan (PhD Alumnus), Richard Wang (PhD), Ian Carpick (PhD), and Larry Lyu (MA)

UC Santa Cruz Linguists at CreteLing

There was a large UCSC contingent at CreteLing 2022 this year, the annual linguistics summer school hosted at the University of Crete in beautiful Rethymno. Two current faculty members, Professors Ivy Sichel and Donka Farkas, and incoming faculty member Professor Roumyana Pancheva, taught classes over the two-week program. Nine students from UCSC, both undergraduate and graduate, attended these classes and others. Here are some quotes from participants about their favorite part of the program:

UCSC linguists at the Port of Rethymno

UCSC students and professors at the Port of Rethymno. From left clockwise: Owen O’Brien (senior), Sophia Stremel (PhD), Sadie Lewis (senior), Donka Farkas (faculty), Eli Sharf (PhD), Jackson Confer (alum), Matthew Kogan (MA), Roumyana Pancheva (faculty), Ivy Sichel (faculty), and Niko Webster (PhD).

“Easily, the best part was getting to know so many brilliant professors and students from around the world, both in the classroom and out. Conversations with new friends were consistently insightful and rewarding, and I loved being able to explore the island during down time and end the days with good food and night swims in such great company.” – Jackson Confer, alum

“At CreteLing, I enjoyed many of the meals we shared together, lunch between classes, and late-night dinners, where everyone was welcome and we seemed to keep cramming chairs around the table. Some of the most exciting conversations were had over a great meal and a view of the Mediterranean.” – Sadie Lewis, senior

“I really enjoyed going out with our big Santa Cruz cohort to enjoy the tremendous food and culture in Crete. I was quite excited to be thinking about Linguistics with everyone in this very vacation-esque setting.” – Matthew Kogan, 2nd year MA

Donka and Sabine at the final dinner.

Donka Farkas, Professor Emerita at UCSC and Sabine Iatridou, Professor at MIT and Co-Director of CreteLing

“It was pure joy to be in a real classroom with real live students again.  I loved interacting with the large and lively UCSC contingent, in class, at Brew your Mind cafe, on the bus, or even during a brief forced march from the classroom to the bus station.” – Donka Farkas, Professor Emerita

“I enjoyed dancing: whether in the club or in the streets!” – Owen O’Brien, senior

“Wednesday was our off-day in the middle of the week. I loved going to the local beach and swimming in the warm Mediterranean on this day, having some time to enjoy the sun and think about ideas I learned in class the previous few days.” – Eli Sharf, 2nd year PhD 

Delaney Gomez-Jackson on a bus.

UCSC MA student Delaney Gomez-Jackson enjoying the bus ride back to downtown Rethymno after a long day of classes

UCSC linguists at the Final Dinner

UCSC students celebrating at the dinner and dance party hosted on the final night of the program. From left clockwise: Sadie Lewis (senior), Sophia Stremel (PhD), Matthew Kogan (MA), Jackson Confer (alum), Owen O’Brien (senior), Elifnur Ulusoy (MA), Niko Webster (PhD), and Eli Sharf (PhD).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pictures of the University of Crete

A collage of film photos of the Rethymno campus taken by Delaney Gomez-Jackson.

Hangout out in Crete

Niko Webster (left), Owen O’Brien (right, back), and Sadie Lewis (right, front) hang out and drink coffee in front of the common room during a class break.

 

 

 

 

 

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!

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