Category: Events

Colloquium: Matt Wagers

Last Friday, the Department held a colloquium with Professor Matt Wagers as the invited speaker. Matt’s talk was entitled “Setting healthy (mnemonic) boundaries”:

Nearly 20 years ago, Lewis & Vasishth (2005) applied the ACT-R modeling framework to language processing by creating an English parser fragment embedded in an associative memory. McElree (2000) and McElree, Foraker & Dyer (2003) informed this development by providing earlier arguments in favor of such a content-addressable memory. This proved to be hugely influential because it offered a general theory of dependency resolution which could be made precise by reference to any particular theory of linguistic features. Both strands of thought reoriented thinking in the field away from models of working memory that required serial search procedures and, generally, the discovery of widespread interference effects has vindicated that shift. Much recent research has made progress in delineating what the representations are (Yadav et al. 2023, Keshev et al. 2025) and how they can be learned in an unsupervised manner (Ryu & Lewis 2021). Relatively unexplored is how to characterize the information that can be attended to simultaneously, sometimes called the “focus of attention” (Oberauer & Hein 2012). This is an important commitment of models like ACT-R and provides an attractive point of articulation to theories of locality or linguistic domains. In this talk, I will survey what we know (and don’t know) about the focus of attention in language processing (Wagers & McElree 2013, 2022) and relate it to recent thinking about the dynamics of context encoding (Healey, Long & Kahana 2019; Balachandran, Wagers & Rich 2025).

After the colloquium, students and faculty took a walk down by the ocean at the Coastal Sciences Campus, where a pod of whales was spotted, as well as at least one otter (photo courtesy of Jungu Kang).

A sea otter

Successful 2025 Graduate Research Symposium

Our annual graduate student research and professionalization seminar, LING 290, culminated this year in a Spring Research Symposium held on Friday, April 11, in Humanities 2. The symposium showcased a wide range of ongoing research across subfields. The list of presenters included:

Session 1
– Yağmur Kiper, The semantics of the imperfectives in Turkish
– Emily Knick, Future reference and covert modality in Khalkha Mongolian
– Aidan Katson, Expanding the nominal in English ACC- and POSS-ing nominalizations

Session 2
– Ian Carpick, Deriving vowel reduction from a law governing human motion
– Larry Lyu, The local meets the non-local: assimilation-induced transparency in vowel harmony
– Hanyoung Byun, Interaction between consonant voicing and vowel devoicing in Seoul Korean

Session 3
– Ruoqing Yao, What gets to race? Distinguishedness effect on the ambiguity advantage effect
– Richard Wang, Investigating the role of duration in the categorization of Mandarin tone

Congratulations to all the participants in LING 290 for the excellent progress they’ve made on their research! A big thanks to Professor Rachel Walker, the instructor of the seminar, and all faculty members who have sat in the seminar to give valuable feedback on the presentations! (photo credit: Jungu Kang)

  • PhD student Yağmur Kiper
  • PhD student Ian Carpick
  • PhD student Ruoqing Yao
  • PhD student Aidan Katson
  • PhD student Larry Lyu
  • PhD student Richard Wang
  • PhD student Hanyoung Byun
  • Professor Rachel Walker

Another successful LASC

On March 10, the Department hosted its annual Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference, attended by prospective graduate students and current students, faculty and alumni. The program included presentations by several graduate students and alumnus Rodrigo Gutiérrez Bravo, now Professor at El Colegio de México.

The student presentations showcased recent research going on in the department, and sparked lively and insightful discussion during the Q & A:

  • Jonathan Paramore led off the presentations with a talk on “Covert URs: evidence from Pakistani Punjabi”
  • Yaqing Cao followed with a talk on “Scope reconstruction in head movements as featural Valuations”
  • Matthew Kogan and Niko Webster presented a talk entitled “Subject islands are not reducible to discourse function”

The Distinguished Alumnus speaker was Professor Rodrigo Gutiérrez Bravo, who gave a talk entitled “Not in the complementizer system: Information Structure features in Spanish clefts and pseudo-clefts”, where he argued that structures which have a position that can show multiple informational properties can be particularly insightful for understanding the interaction between information structure and syntax.

The LASC dinner and celebration that followed at the Cowell Provost House featured delightful conversations, excellent food, and stunning views of the forest and ocean.

Thank you to all of the students, staff, and faculty who contributed to making this event a success!

  • Rodrigo Gutiérrez Bravo [credit: Jungu Kang]
  • Distinguished Alumnus Address — Rodrigo Gutiérrez Bravo
  • Jonathan Paramore [credit: Jungu Kang]
  • Yaqing Cao [credit: Jungu Kang]
  • Matthew Kogan and Niko Webster [credit: Jungu Kang]
  • Yağmur Kiper [credit: Jungu Kang]
  • Matt Wagers offering Closing Remarks [credit: Jungu Kang]
  • Left to right: Maziar Toosarvandani, Matthew Kogan, Matt Wagers, Ivy Sichel, Joshua Lieberstein [credit: Jungu Kang]

McCloskey gives first colloquium of the year

Linguistics faculty and students gathered together last Friday afternoon for the first colloquium of the year, given by Professor Emeritus Jim McCloskey. In a talk entitled “Clauses without Verbs: The Irish Landscape and Beyond,” Jim argued that Irish clauses instantiate one of two basic shapes, one more familiar and another less so. In the latter, a predicate — often something other than a verb — can appear with some, but not all of the regular functional structure of a clause. The talk provided a detailed investigation of a less studied clause type in Irish, and invites re-examination of so-called copular clauses in other languages. The talk was followed by a lively question and answer period, and later that evening a potluck at Ivy’s house.

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McCloskey Colloquium on Friday

This Friday, our own Jim McCloskey will give the first colloquium talk of the fall quarter, titled “Clauses without Verbs: The Irish Landscape and Beyond”. The talk will take place on Friday, November 8, at 1:20 pm in HUM 1 – 210.

Jim’s abstract is as follows:

One of the ways (perhaps the principal way) in which contemporary Irish departs from the typological profile of a Standard Average European (SAE) language is in its intricate and rich subsystem of finite verbless clauses. This subsystem will be the focus of my talk.

There is existing work on the topic, but that work focuses almost exclusively on clauses which express copular relations (predicative, identificational, specificational). This talk will focus instead on the very large (and largely unstudied) class of predications which are verbless in their syntax but not copular in their semantics. It turns out that this sub-grouping includes many kinds of predication which have been of interest and importance in contemporary formal semantics and philosophy of language — almost all of the familiar modal expressions, comparative clauses, propositional attitude predicates, subjective attitude ascriptions, structures of weak quantification, predicates of temporal duration and frequency, predicates of knowledge, acquaintance and many other psychological states (but not physical states).

The first goal of the talk will be descriptive — to provide an overview (syntactic and semantic) of these predication types — with a view ultimately of answering the typological-theoretical question of what predication-types can in principle be expressed in a verb-free syntactic frame.

The second goal will be to develop a syntactic framework which can accommodate these patterns and make the correct distributional predictions and connections within the language.

The third goal will be to consider theoretical implications (some syntactic, some semantic), especially for the theory of extended projection and for the question of how roots are integrated into larger structures.

Another academic year begins

On Friday, September 27th, the Department came together at the Cowell Provost House to kick off the academic year with our annual fall welcome event. With clear skies and beautiful views, it was the perfect opportunity for faculty and graduate students to reconnect after the summer and meet the newest members of the department.

The department at the welcoming event

At the event, we welcomed six new PhD students to the Department. Nadine Abdel-Rahman, Jungu Kang, Hareem Khokhar, Subhekshya Shrestha, and Emma Smith are starting as first years, while Larry Lyu has transitioned from the MA track to the PhD program.

To the MA program, we were excited to welcome Amenia Denson, as well as Cal Boye-Lynn and Joshua Lieberstein, who are joining as BA/MA students.

The Department also warmly welcomed Dustin Chacón, who joined as an Assistant Professor this fall. 

The event was filled with conversations about recent research and upcoming projects. In the coming weeks, we will be sharing updates from faculty and students about their research adventures and what’s on the horizon for this academic year. Stay tuned!

(As an added surprise, a few of the wild turkeys that inhabit the campus joined us, appearing as though they, too, had enjoyed a productive and restful summer. )

The event was graced by a group of turkeys

Successful LURC 2024

On June 7, the annual Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) took place at the London Nelson Center in downtown Santa Cruz. LURC showcases a variety of linguistic research by UCSC undergraduates majoring in Language Studies and Linguistics.

This year’s LURC features nine posters:

  • Monique Aingworth, Julia Helmer, Grace Nighswonger: The impact of coordination ambiguity on garden path sentences
  • Amenia Denson: Mixed directionality in A’ingae nasal spreading
  • Samuel Almer: Pre-nasal raising patterns in California English
  • Killian Kiuttu: Color harmony in Dolgan
  • Amanda Pollem, E.Z. Dashiell, Jennifer Hernandez, Jordy Chanon, Valen Munson: Specificity and constraint in word prediction
  • Cal Boye-Lynn: Chasing phantoms of auditory bias
  • Andrew Kato: Restricting the scope of a relative measure
  • Millie Hacker: The gradual deletion hypothesis: Evidence from variable denasalization in Hixkaryana
  • Benjamin Sommer, Samuel Almer, Michael Proctor (Macquarie University), Rachel Walker (Faculty): Annotating acoustic speech data with MATLAB tools

This year’s distinguished alumni speaker is Prof. Kirby Conrod (BA, 2011, now Assistant Prof. at Swarthmore College), who gave a talk titled “Pronoun Euphoria”.

Congrats to everyone on their achievement, and thank you to all the faculty and volunteers who contributed to organizing the conference!

  • Prof Matt Wagers giving an opening speech as the department chair

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