WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
On Thursday, June 12, the Linguistics Department held its End-of-Year Celebration in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge for our graduating students. The event brought together faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, friends, and family from across the UCSC linguistics community.
Here are a few highlights from the celebration:
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.”
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.
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
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:
Thanks to Jungu Kang for taking photos throughout the workshop. Some highlights are below:
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!
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.
