Category: Events

Slugs Embrace Yolo @ CAMP[8]

Santa Cruzans migrated en masse to Yolo County last weekend for CAMP[8], to participate in the eighth edition of the California Meeting on Psycholinguistics, held at UC Davis from Nov 14-16. CAMP featured presentations (in chronological order) from Matt Wagers (“Hands-on LLM Tutorial”, with Rachel Ryskin), Matthew Kogan & Ruoqing Yao (“Sources of distortion and confusion in distributed representations of morphosyntactic structure”, with Wagers) & Cal Boye-Lynn (“A Fricative by Any Other Name: A Close Replication of Shinn & Blumstein (1984)”, with Grant McGuire & Amanda Rysling).

It also featured encounters with a number of barn-yard animals, like a Muscovy duck (pictured), some friends from UCLA (also pictured), and near-collisions with Davis’ famously numerous cyclists (imagined anxiously).

Promenading duck at the Ruhstaller Farm. Photo credit: Subhs Shrestha.

Linguists, Applied Linguists and Psychologists, oh my! L to r: Shrestha, Liu, Chan (APLX), Boye-Lynn, Hoversten (PSYC), Rysling, Yao, Kogan, Duff (UCLA Linguistics; UCSC Ph.D. ’23), Carpick, Wagers. Photo credit: M. Afkir.

Who’s Haunting At Santa Cruz?

The spooks of Stevenson were out in full modest force this Halloween and the WHASC Photographer was there to capture the horror.

 

Members of the Linguistics community in costume for Halloween

(l to r): Mick Fleetwood, Spooky Tober, Autumnal Lady of the Knoll, Count Noun
(Not pictured: Steampunk Shrestha)

It’s not easy being Orange in the UC

Six Slugs A-sinnin’!

According to Wiktionary, a collective of slugs may be referred to as a cornucopia. With all due emphasis on that modal, there’s no denying that Banana Slugs were copious at last month’s edition of Sinn und Bedeutung. Held at Goethe University Frankfurt, SuB30 featured presentations from many community members:

You can see most of these folks pictured below!

(l to r): Sharf, Knick, Hofmann, Unidentified Frankfurter, Li, Tamura. Not pictured: Cao.

Spring 2025 End-of-year celebration

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:

  • Undergraduate Advising and Program Coordinator Gwyn Vandevere
  • Professor and Undergraduate Program Director Maziar Toosarvandani
  • Professor and Department Chair Matt Wagers

 

 

LURC 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

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.

Professor Li Nguyen Gave Talk at UCSC

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

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