Category: Events

Successful 2024 Graduate Research Symposium

Our annual graduate student research and professionalization seminar, LING 290, culminated this year in two installments of the Spring Research Symposium on Friday, April 19, and Friday, April 26. The list of presenters includes:

April 19

April 26

Congratulations to all the participants in LING 290 for the wonderful progress they’ve made on their research! A big thanks to faculty Roumi Pancheva, who is the instructor of the seminar, and all faculty members who have sat in the seminar to give valuable feedback on the presentations!

  • Ian Carpick

Another successful LASC in the book

On March 11, the Department hosted its annual Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference, attended by prospective graduate students, current students, faculty, and alumni. The program included presentations by three graduate students and alumnus Eric Potsdam (PhD, 1996), now Professor at University of Florida.

The student presentations showcased recent research going on in the department, featuring:

  • Eli Sharf (3rd-year): “Restrictive Modifiers in Parenthetical Positions”
  • Elifnur Ulusoy (3rd-year): “Effects of Hierarchical Structure in Agreement Attraction: Evidence from Turkish”
  • Maya Wax Cavallaro (5th-year): “The Syllable in Domain Generalization: Evidence from Artificial Language Learning”

The Distinguished Alumnus Lecture given by Eric is on “Exceptives, Ellipsis, and Negation“.

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

  • LASC presenters (left-right): Elifnur Ulusoy, Maya Wax Cavallaro, Eli Sharf, Eric Potsdam

Pi(e) day celebration

The Department continued its newly inaugurated tradition from last year and hosted the second annual pi(e) party in the Cave on March 14. This year, we saw a mixed line-up of pies from sweet (Matcha, key lime, tangerine, to name a few) and savory (empanadas, veggie pizza, quiche, etc.), brought and made by faculty and staff. Everyone had a great time tasting and celebrating the success of this year’s open house and LASC events.

 

A big thank-you to all the pie-bringers and everyone for their service at the department events!

Lunar New Year Breakfast in DRIP

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

Slugs at Centennial LSA Meeting

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).

  • UCSC Gathering (from left to right): Caroline Andrews, Maura O'Leary, Robert Henderson, Dan Brodkin, Yaqing Cao, Maziar Toosarvandani, Matt Wagers, Ruoqing Yao, Richard Wang

Banana slugs at the Summer Institute

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.

Another successful LURC

LURC Presenters, standing in front of log in Stevenson CourtyardOn 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:

  • Cal Boye-Lynn, Killian Kiuttu, and Mackenzi Rauls: Everyone loves complements: Complementizer-determiner ambiguity and acceptability
  • Tony Butorovich, Claire Wellwood, and Max Xie: Production of English /r/ by prosodic position
  • Sophie Green, Shaya Karasso, and Josh Lieberstein: Ambiguity Advantage Effect in Wh-questions
  • Nicholas Hanson: Conveyances of sarcasm in written language
  • Colin Hirschberg: Affectedness in passives
  • Sadira Lewis: Events and ambiguity in -er nominals: An experimental approach
  • Stephen Migdal: “At least,” QUD, and Pragmatic Enrichment of NNPs
  • Wilson Wenhao Sun: OT account for consonant clusters in Cantonese loanword phonology
  • Nishant Suria: A phonetic investigation of the retroflex approximant in Tamil

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.

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