Category: Events

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

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

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