Category: Alumni News

As the cockroach flies

Jake Vincent, who graduated with the Ph.D. in June 2021, writes with the following update and photo:
“Since graduating, I’ve moved to the San Fernando Valley (“The Valley”) and have been adjusting to all things SoCal: heat, being tailgated, and the occasional flying cockroach, to name a few. I miss the Santa Cruz redwoods, but I’m appreciating the natural beauty of the area down here, too (see photo). Work wise, I’m currently teaching Language & Mind remotely, which I’m enjoying since I never had the opportunity to TA for the class. While I patiently look for my next career move, I’m working on small projects here and there, including writing a text editor plugin for navigating markdown notebooks.”
Pictured below: the Garden of the Gods, in the Northwest corner of the valley.

MORIMOTO RECEIVES JSPS POSTDOC

Dr. Maho Morimoto (Ph.D. 2020) was recently awarded a 3 year post doctoral position by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science to study the articulation and acoustic properties of geminate consonants in Japanese. Congratulations to Maho!

MIKKELSEN TO FULL

It was announced late in the summer that alumna Line Mikkelsen had been promoted to the rank of Professor in the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley. Line earned the Ph.D. at Santa Cruz in 2004 (her committee: Donka Farkas, Bill Ladusaw and Jim McCloskey) and began her career at Berkeley in the Fall semester following her graduation. She has worked on the linguistics of the Scandinavian languages and also on the indigenous languages of California and she is particularly well-known for her work on copula constructions. A paper with co-author Jorge Hankamer (`CP Complements to D) appeared in the most recent issue of Linguistic Inquiry (52.3 2021).

Van HANDEL IN PHONOLOGY AND OTHER NEW PUBLICATIONS

Nick Van Handel’s paper, “Matching overtly headed syntactic phrases in Italian,” has just appeared in the journal Phonology. Congratulations, Nick!

It joins several articles that have appeared since the June issue of WHASC, including Hankamer & Mikkelsen (mentioned above) on “CP Complements to D” and Chung & Wagers on “On the universality of intrusive resumption.”

  • Jorge Hankamer, Line Mikkelsen; CP Complements to D. Linguistic Inquiry 2021; 52 (3): 473–518. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00387
  • Chung, S., Wagers, M.W. On the universality of intrusive resumption: Evidence from Chamorro and Palauan. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 39, 759–801 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-020-09493-9
  • Van Handel, N. (2021). Matching overtly headed syntactic phrases in Italian. Phonology, 38(2), 317-356. doi:10.1017/S095267572100018X

AMP’D UP SLUGS

The Annual Meeting on Phonology happened just last weekend (Oct 1-3, 2021; hosted by Toronto), and it was positively infested with banana slugs.

Jaye, Ryan, Grant, and Máire Ní Chiosáin of University College Dublin presented their poster “Russian Palatalization is [back, high], not [ATR]”.

Ben Eischens presented a poster titled “Phonology is Phonetically Grounded but not Phonetically Detailed”, and Yaqing Cao presented “Revisiting Tone Sandhi Domain in Xiamen Chinese”.

In addition, alums Anya Hogoboom (UCSC Ph.D. 2006, William & Mary College), Eric Bakovic (UCSC B.A., 1993, UC San Diego) and Nathan Sanders (UCSC Ph.D., 2003, U of Toronto) participated in the AMP Teaching Workshop.

NEDERLANDSE GROETEN VAN TOM ROBERTS

After defending his dissertation over the summer, Tom Roberts (Ph.D. 2021) began a postdoc in September in the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation at the University of Amsterdam, working with Reinhard Muskens on modeling abductive reasoning in natural language. He reports an exciting and cross-disciplinary environment at the ILLC with semanticists of all stripes, and is adjusting to life in the Old World, speaking Dutch, and biking without the constant threat of mortal peril. At the time of press, he has not yet determined whether it is possible to subsist exclusively on a diet of hagelslag and poffertjes, but this remains an area of active research.

JACKFRUIT ADOBO IN THE PIONEER VALLEY

An update from Jed Pizarro-Guevara (Ph.D. 2020), currently a postdoc at UMass-Amherst: “Now that things are sorta back to normal(ish), I’m getting to know the department here at UMass and I’m really enjoying my time here. I’m working with Brian Dillon and an RA from the University of the Philippines – Diliman and we’re currently looking at interference effects when Tagalog comprehenders process reflexive dependencies. Outside of work, I’ve been experimenting with how to veganize Filipino dishes. I have to say, jackfruit adobo is pretty good — but it still doesn’t beat pork adobo!”

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