WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow Jaime Pérez González has accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Linguistics at UC Santa Barbara. In 2022-2023, Jaime will finish his post-doc in UCSC Linguistics, and will then begin at UC Santa Barbara in Fall of 2023. Congrats, Jaime!
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**
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~~
WHASC extends a warm editorial welcome to James Funk, our new graduate advisor and graduate program coordinator. Per Department Manager Sarah Amador:
James earned his PhD in English at UC Irvine, and joins us at UC Santa Cruz after working as an adjunct professor at UC Riverside and Clemson University. He brings a wealth of experience in teaching and mentoring students to his new role, and I know that his multi-faceted and nuanced understanding of graduate student advising and program management will serve us all well in Linguistics.
We’re very glad to have you join us, James.
Fall 2021 marks a season of unprecedented change not only in the wider world, but here in the halls of Stevenson College. Some of our colleagues, like Junko Ito and Ashley Hardisty, have moved into different roles. But we’ve welcomed many new denizens, like Professor Rachel Walker, new Department Manager Sarah Amador, Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Scholar Jaime Perez Gonzalez, and new Graduate Coordinator James Funk (q.v. sup.). And the Cave once again teems with life with our large incoming class of Ph.D., M.A., and B.A./M.A. students (and can we rightly call it a cave anymore, after the pre-pandemic reno? The Grotto, anyone?).
In view of all this, WHASC is pleased to announce its series “New Faces in Stevenson,” featuring a few capsule interviews each issue to better get to know our new colleagues. Keep your eyes peeled for the first instal(l)ment in the next issue!
Jess H.-K. Law, doctoral student in Linguistics at Rutgers University, will be joining the Department of Linguistics at UCSC as Assistant Professor in the coming academic year! Jess works in theoretical and experimental linguistics, with a focus on semantics and pragmatics. Specifically, she enjoys puzzling over distributivity, plurality, dynamic semantics, speech acts, bare noun phrases. She writes,
There is no better home for my research and teaching than Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz, and there is no better home for my family than the beautiful city of Santa Cruz. I eagerly look forward to working alongside all the brilliant linguists at the department to push the boundary of linguistics.
Congratulations, Jess!
Hitomi Hirayama successfully defended her dissertation on February 27. The presentation investigated the interrogative use of the discourse particles wa and no(da) in Japanese, and it comprised a subset of her dissertation, entitled “Asking and Answering Questions: Discourse Strategies in Japanese.” Her committee consisted of Donka Farkas (co-chair), Adrian Brasoveanu (co-chair), and Ivy Sichel. The defense was followed by a lively celebration hosted by Donka, where members of the linguistic community came together to cheer on Hitomi’s achievements. Congratulations, Hitomi!
Junko Ito and Armin Mester have been successfully awarded a 2-year NSF grant for Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory (SPOT), an ongoing collaborative research project with Jenny Bellik, Nick Kalivoda, and Ozan Bellik, which aims to develop new tools for rigorously investigating the mapping from syntactic to prosodic structure in Optimality Theory.
SPOT has also received workshop funding as a Humanities Institute research cluster for 2018-19. The first SPOT workshop took place in Fall 2017.
Congratulations also to Nick Kalivoda, who will be holding a one-year postdoc position during 2018-19 on the SPOT NSF grant at UCSC.