WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
On Lunar New Year’s Eve (Feb 9), Assistant Professor Amanda Rysling hosted a festive breakfast with traditional (microwaved and homemade) Asian food with contributions from reading group participants in the LCR. DRIP, or “the Directed Reading in Implicit Prosody” also discussed a paper, Barnes et al. (2012) on Tonal Center of Gravity, led by first-year Ph.D. student Emily Knick.
Participants at DRIP’s Lunar New Year Breakfast
UCSC Linguistics was well-represented at the centennial Linguistics Society of America meeting that took place in the heart of New York, NY, from Jan 4-7.
Poster-wise, fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Yaqing Cao presented a poster on “Modals and negations LF-PF (mis)matches in English and Mandarin” and second-year Ph.D. student Richard Wang presented a poster on “Distribution of neutral tone and retroflex lenition in Beijing Mandarin“.
Also in attendance were Profs. Matt Wagers and Maziar Toosarvandani, Robert Henderson (U. of Arizona, Ph.D. 2012), Caroline Andrews (U. of Zurich, B.A. 2011), Maura O’Leary (Swarthmore College, B.A. 2013).
Linguists from UC Santa Cruz are well represented at the 2023 Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute, which is taking place June 19-July 14 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Rising second year PhD student Richard Wang is in attendance, after receiving a highly selective Linguistic Institute Fellowship.
Professor Matt Wagers is co-teaching a course on Field Psycholinguistics, with PhD alumnus Jed Pizarro Guevara (PhD 2020), who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at UMass.
Other banana slugs in attendance include Professor Eric Bakovic (BA, 1993), who is teaching a course on What Exactly is Phonological Opacity, Professor Kyle Rawlins (PhD, 2008), who is teaching a course on Advanced Pragmatics, and Professor Aaron White (BA, 2009), who is teaching a course on Representation Learning for Syntactic and Semantic Theory.
On June 2, students and faculty in the department gathered for the Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC). This annual conference celebrates the groundbreaking research of Language Studies and Linguistics majors and is always a highlight of the department’s academic year calendar.
This year’s LURC was no exception, featuring nine posters on a range of topics in phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics, syntax, and semantics:
After brief presentations and a discussion period, the Distinguished Alumna Speaker Caroline Andrews (BA, Linguistics, 2011) spoke on “Optionality and commitment: Sentence planning in an ergative language.” Dr. Andrews received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2019, and she is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich.
This past weekend (May 5-7) saw over 125 linguists from around the world convene in and around Stevenson College for the 41st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 41). They presented 42 talks and 39 posters, on a wide range of topics in theoretical phonology, syntax, and semantics. Two special sessions brought together specialists on phi-features and deixis and anaphora; one virtual poster session enabled presenters not able to attend in person to participate; three invited speakers gave plenary talks on social gender and nominal structure, locality at the morphology-phonology interface, and demonstrative expressions.
The photo gallery below captures the lively spirit of the conference, which featured a conference dinner and other social events, alongside the talks and posters. For some attendees, the conference ended in a visit to the giant redwoods at Henry Cowell State Park, where a special session on “root structure” was held (video courtesy of fourth year PhD student Dan Brodkin).
In addition to many current faculty and students, alumni Andrew Hedding (PhD, 2022), Aaron Kaplan (PhD, 2008), and Line Mikkelsen (PhD, 2004) were present. Some other past members of the department were also in attendance, but were not captured photographically, including Vera Gribanova (PhD, 2010) and Boris Harizanov (PhD, 2014).
One person appears in only a couple of these photos, because she was behind the camera, fourth-year PhD student Yaqing Cao.
WCCFL 41 was made possible by the generous support of the Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz and the Department of Linguistics, as well as the tremendous dedication and hard work of many linguistics graduate students and LRC Coordinator Maria Zimmer.
Nido de Lenguas, the collaboration between linguists at UC Santa Cruz and local Oaxacan cultural organization Senderos, continued this April with two Pop-Up events at a film screening (Historias de Culturas: Oaxaca in Santa Cruz) in downtown Santa Cruz on April 8 and the annual Guelaguetza festival at the Branciforte Small Schools on April 16. The latter event was attended by over 2,400 people, where UCSC linguists had the opportunity to share the Indigenous languages of Oaxaca with many festival goers.
The Guelaguetza was covered by the Santa Cruz Sentinel and local TV station KSBW.
Senderos Co-Founder Fe Silva Robles (left) and UC Santa Cruz graduate students (from left to right), Delaney Gomez-Jackson, Jack Duff, Matthew Kogan, and Eli Sharf, at Historias de Culturas: Oaxaca in Santa Cruz
The Department recently inaugurated a new tradition, with its first annual Pi(e) Party, which was held not on 3/14, due to inclement rain, but on March 16. The event saw a serious lineup of pies, including some more expected fare — several berry and apple pies — as well as a somewhat more exotic buttermilk pie, and both sweet and savory empanadas.
The WHASC Editor didn’t get a chance to taste every flavor this year, but looks forward to trying next year.
Pi(e) party attendees (behind the camera and not pictured: Roumi Pancheva).
