Events – WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ

LURC 2025

June 3, 2025

The 2025 Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) took place on Friday, May 30. One of the longest running traditions in the Department, the conference featured the largest number of student presenters ever — 31! A total of 13 posters were presented by undergraduates on their original research across six subdisciplines: phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics, semantics, sociolinguistics, and syntax.

Every year, the conference features a Distinguished Alumnus/a Speaker, and this year was no exception. Anissa Zaitsu (BA, 2017; MA, 2018), currently a PhD student at Stanford, gave the keynote talk: “When negative concord fails: Focus, alternatives, and the semantics of double negation.”

Anagnostopoulou colloquium and mini-course

June 3, 2025

The past couple weeks have seen the exciting presence of Professor Elena Anagnostopoulou (University of Crete and IMS-FORTH) around the department. Elena gave a colloquium two Fridays ago on “Rethinking clitics: A view from Greek”, as well as a mini-course last week on testing models of parametric change with phylogenetic tools and methods. Many students and faculty also had the chance to talk with her one-on-one in meetings and in several dinners.

Events

Professor Li Nguyen Gave Talk at UCSC

May 27, 2025

On May 15, Professor Jess Law and incoming LAAL Professor Ariel Chan co-organized a talk by Professor Li Nguyen (Nanyang Technological University) entitled “Bilingualism on the ground: Insights from the Canberra Vietnamese-English Corpus”. The event drew attendees from across our campus as well as several linguists from nearby institutions.

Professor Li Nguyen giving talk at UCSC

Successful BayPhon 2025

May 19, 2025

On May 10, 2025, UCSC Linguistics hosted BayPhon, a meeting that brought together about 35 faculty and students in the broader Bay area (San José State, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz) to present their work on phonetics and phonology.

Those in attendance enjoyed a day of abundant sun, with exceptional views across Monterey Bay during lunch, and basked in the light of 11 inspiring presentations and warm conversations. Many thanks to the students and faculty who organized the event, especially the primary organizers: PhD students Hanyoung Byun, Richard Wang, and Professor Rachel Walker.

UCSC researchers were among those presenting at the workshop:

Myke Brinkerhoff presented a talk titled “The acoustics landscape of voice quality.”
Hanyoung Byun presented a poster titled “Lenis obstruent voicing in Seoul Korean: Phonological or phonetic?”
Ian Carpick presented a talk titled “Deriving vowel reduction from a law governing human motion.”

Thanks to Jungu Kang for taking photos throughout the workshop. Some highlights are below:

PhD Student Ian Carpick
PhD Student Hanyoung Byun
PhD Student Myke Brinkerhoff
Professor Rachel Walker at the poster session with presenters

Nido de Lenguas at the Guelaguetza

May 19, 2025

Nido de Lenguas continued its annual tradition of tabling at Senderos’ Vive Oaxaca Guelaguetza to raise public awareness about the Indigenous languages of Oaxaca. In addition to PhD students Max Kaplan, Matthew Kogan, and Maya Wax Cavallaro and undergraduate students Alexa Ballesteros and Jackie Torres (BA, Linguistics), this year’s team included students from the Estudiantes Oaxaqueños de Ahora, an interest group which aims to build a supportive community for Oaxacan students on campus. Its volunteers reported having a phenomenal time talking to guests about the languages and dialects they speak!

Raul Hernandez, Alexa Ballesteros, Jackie Torres, Lizbeth Ortiz, and Daisy Lopez (from left to right)

Nido de Lenguas table at the Guelaguetza

Maya Wax Cavallaro, Max Kaplan, Daisy Lopez, Alexa Ballesteros, Lizbeth Ortiz, and Jackie Torres (from left to right)

Nido de Lenguas table at the Guelaguetza

Matthew Kogan at the Nido de Lenguas table

Anagnostopoulou colloquium

May 19, 2025

This Friday (May 23), the Department will welcome Professor Elena Anagnostopoulou (University of Crete and IMS-FORTH), who will give a colloquium talk entitled “Rethinking clitics: A view from Greek” (1:20 pm, Humanities 1, Room 202):

In this talk, I will revisit the relationship between clitic doubling and object agreement in connection to the syntax of clitics, via an assessment of three recent proposals on Greek clitic doubling. I will offer novel evidence based on co-ordination resolution supporting the view that clitic doubling involves a dependency between a clitic with iφ and a DP with iφ. Finally, I will highlight arguments that, in my view, are crucial to decide between different versions of movement analyses.

Professor Anagnostopoulou will be sticking around the Department next week, when she will give a two-day mini-course on parameters.

Events

Santa Cruz linguists at WCCFL

May 5, 2025

The 43rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 43) took place a couple weekends ago at the University of Washington (April 25-27), with several Santa Crucians in attendance.

PhD student Aidan Katson gave a talk on Korean honorification as a window to understanding animacy,” while PhD student Niko Webster presented a poster on “The syntactic and semantic introduction of internal arguments.” Professor Mia Gong gave a talk on “Specification of D Derives Variation in Relative Clauses” (with Eszter Ótott-Kovács) and presented a poster, “Scrambling through the Looking Glass: Two Types of Movement across Weak Islands.” Professor Maziar Toosarvandani was also in attendance as an audience member.

The Santa Cruz students and faculty got a chance to catch up with some past members of the department. Professor Ruth Kramer (PhD, 2009; Georgetown) gave a talk on “Passivization, speech act participants, and third-person probes in Jarawara” (with Luke Adamson). Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv), a recent visitor in the Department, co-presented a talk, “The bilingual lexicon under Distributed Morphology: An investigation of gender agreement in code-switching.” Professor Andrew Hedding (PhD, 2022), now an Assistant Professor at UW, was on hand as one of the conference’s organizers.