Category: Faculty News

Goings-on in Gotham

Santa Cruz was well represented at NELS56, recently held at NYU (October 17-19, 2025).

Current and erstwhile slugs delivered at least four talks and four posters at this year’s edition of NELS:

Talks

  1. Yağmur Kiper, “Ellipsis as leverage for dependent case theory”
  2. Emily Knick, “Proximate futures in English and Turkish: An analogy between spatial and temporal proximity”
  3. Aidan Katson, “Expanding the nominal in English ACC- and POSS-ing nominalizations”
  4. Emilio Gonzalez, (UCSC B.A. ’22), now a graduate student in Linguistics at UCSD, “Condition A, logophors, and wh-movement”

Posters

  1. Emma Slater-Smith,”An Agree-based Account of PCC in English Double Object Constructions”
  2. Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv University), “Intra-sentential code switching at the syntax-prosody interface”, co-authored with Julia Horvath
  3. Niko Webster and Ivy Sichel, “Subject islands do not reduce to construction-specific discourse function”, co-authored with Mandy Cartner, Matthew Kogan, and Matt Wagers

Front (l to r): Sichel, Cartner & Gonzalez;
Back (“”): Katson, Slater-Smith, Webster, Kiper, Knick

Sweet Memories of Eugene

Here at WHASC, our motto is practically “we would love to hear you from!”. And there is no statute of limitations on news from your (extra-)linguistic life. So, here’s a little summer throwback …

Rachel Walker gave a talk titled “Dynamics of Vocalic Articulations in Syllable Rhymes: Sesquisyllables in Australian English” on behalf of Michael Proctor and herself at DYMOS: Dynamical Models of Speech [conference program], a conference hosted July 26-27 at the LSA Linguistics Institute at the University of Oregon.

Santa Crucians at SALT

The 35th meeting of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 35) recently took place at Harvard University (May 20-22). Professor Adrian Brasoveanu gave a talk entitled “Towards a Cognitively Plausible Quantitative Formalization of Counterfactual Interpretation.” Several department alumni were also in attendance, including Professor Chris Barker (PhD, 1991; NYU) and the following presenters:

Pictured (from left to right): Robert Henderson, Scott AnderBois, Jack Duff, Chris Barker, Adrian Brasoveanu, and Kelsey Sasaki

Anand at Mayfest

During May 16-17, Professor Pranav Anand traveled to the University of Maryland for Mayfest, where he spoke and met up with several BA alums. This year’s Mayfest focused on constraints and gaps in lexical meaning, and Pranav’s talk, English ‘coming-to-know’ predicates: evidence and knowledge, reported on joint work with Natasha Korotkova on the lexical structure of a rich class of semi-factives. Also presenting was Professor Aaron Steven White (BA 2009), whose talk, Inducing lexical semantic generalizations, detailed a computational model that learns distributional and inferential generalizations. In addition to White, Pranav got the chance to catch up with recent BA alums Jackson Confer and Sadie Lewis, who were finishing their Baggett Fellowships, and Sarah Lee, who is now attending the University of California, College of the Law.

Professor Pranav Anand

THI celebrates 25 years

The Humanities Institute (THI), a center for scholarly inquiry in the humanities on campus, has been celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. A recent long-form piece in the UC Santa Cruz Magazine recognizes THI’s many achievements, building critical infrastructure to support research excellence and student success.

THI was founded in 1999 by Professor Emeritus Jorge Hankamer, then Dean of Humanities, and linguists have continued to be involved in its development. THI’s Managing Director is Irena Polić (BA, 2001, MA 2003), and the current faculty director is Professor Pranav Anand. 

Congratulations, THI!

Jorge Hankamer, with Mary-Kay Gamel (Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature), Jennifer H. Yearley (BA, 1991) and April Dawn (photo by Don Harris; courtesy of UCSC Special Collections)

 

Law and Hirschberg in the Journal of East Asian Linguistics

Professor Jess Law recently published a paper with a former BA student Colin Hirschberg, entitled “An affectedness approach to Mandarin passives“, in the Journal of East Asian Linguistics. Colin is now pursuing graduate studies in Linguistics at Rutgers University. This paper stemmed from the course LING188 Structure of Chinese Linguistics, taught by Jess in Fall 2021 and sponsored by UCSC Global Engagement. On April 18, Jess also gave a zoom talk based on this work at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. Congratulations, Jess and Colin! 

Abstract: Mandarin bei-passives differ from English be-passives in exhibiting robust semantic constraints. They need to be licensed, by telicity, the experiential perfect, or predicates allowing intention transmittion. These seemingly disjunctive licensing conditions can receive a unified account, based on the semantic notion of affectedness, which we analyze as a family of implicationally organized affectee roles following Beavers (2011). It is argued that Mandarin passives require the highest level of affectedness, which predicts the incompatibility with thematic liberality and the possibility of gapless passives. We also discuss how the affectedness approach can be extended in novel ways to understand the relevance of social impact in bei-passives and to capture cross-linguistic differences in passives.

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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