Category: Faculty News

Slugs Embrace Yolo @ CAMP[8]

Santa Cruzans migrated en masse to Yolo County last weekend for CAMP[8], to participate in the eighth edition of the California Meeting on Psycholinguistics, held at UC Davis from Nov 14-16. CAMP featured presentations (in chronological order) from Matt Wagers (“Hands-on LLM Tutorial”, with Rachel Ryskin), Matthew Kogan & Ruoqing Yao (“Sources of distortion and confusion in distributed representations of morphosyntactic structure”, with Wagers) & Cal Boye-Lynn (“A Fricative by Any Other Name: A Close Replication of Shinn & Blumstein (1984)”, with Grant McGuire & Amanda Rysling).

It also featured encounters with a number of barn-yard animals, like a Muscovy duck (pictured), some friends from UCLA (also pictured), and near-collisions with Davis’ famously numerous cyclists (imagined anxiously).

Promenading duck at the Ruhstaller Farm. Photo credit: Subhs Shrestha.

Linguists, Applied Linguists and Psychologists, oh my! L to r: Shrestha, Liu, Chan (APLX), Boye-Lynn, Hoversten (PSYC), Rysling, Yao, Kogan, Duff (UCLA Linguistics; UCSC Ph.D. ’23), Carpick, Wagers. Photo credit: M. Afkir.

Beatty at NWAV

Sam Beatty, who graduated in Spring 2025, presented a poster at NWAV 53 at the University of Michigan (11/5-7), entitled ‘Gendered voices and transgender bodies: Interlocutor gender identity and linguistic variation in trans speakers’. The poster was co-authored with Grant McGuire and Ivy Sichel, and was based on their honors thesis. Sam reports that they received meaningful feedback, interacted with other sociolinguists, and had a great time overall.

Beatty, Sichel, & McGuire (2025)

Sichel & Toosarvandani in _Linguistic Inquiry_

Congrats to Ivy and Maziar, whose new article appeared this past month in Linguistic Inquiry:

We introduce a novel locality violation and its repair in Southeastern Sierra Zapotec: an object pronoun cannot cliticize when the subject is a lexical DP. We develop an account in which pronouns and lexical DPs interact with the same probe because they share featural content. In particular, we suggest that the Person domain extends to include nonpronominal DPs, so that all nominals are specified for a feature we call [δ] (to resonate with DP), while all and only personal pronouns are specified for [π]. This account aims to unify the locality violation with the Weak Person-Case Constraint (PCC), as well as parallel constraints based on animacy, and requires a departure from Chomsky’s (2000, 2001) classical system of featural covariation (Agree). A functional head must be able to overprobe—that is, interact with more than one goal, even if its requirements appear to be met. We introduce a probe activation model for Agree in which, after applying once, the operation can apply again, subject to certain restrictions. We compare probe activation with two other systems recently proposed to account for overprobing: Deal’s (2015, 2022) “insatiable probes” and Coon and Keine’s (2021) “feature gluttony.” Neither can account for the locality pattern in Zapotec.

 

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

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