Category: Faculty News

Over spring break, linguistics students and faculty were busy presenting posters and talks across the globe:

• Professor Mia Gong and PhD student Niko Webster attended the 14th Workshop on Theoretical East Asian Linguistics (TEAL), hosted by USC on March 18-20. Mia gave an invited talk, “Two types of long distance scrambling in Khalkha Mongolian,” while Niko gave a talk entitled “Internal argument introduction in Korean complex predicates.”
• Several UC Santa Cruz linguists attended the main colloquium of the 47th Annual Meeting of Generative Linguistics in the Old World) in Frankfurt am Main at Goethe University on March 25-27. Niko Webster and Professor Ivy Sichel gave a long talk entitled “Information structure alone cannot account for subject islandhood: An experimental study,” where they presented on collaborative work with Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv University), Matthew Kogan, and Matt Wagers. PhD Student Yaqing Cao gave a lightning talk and poster presentation on “Scope reconstruction in head movements as featural valuations.” While there, they reconnected with Anissa Zaitsu (BA 2017, MA 2018, currently a PhD student at Stanford).
• Yaqing Cao gave a talk at the 49th Penn Linguistics Conference (PLC), entitled “Ability modal, negation, causation: How to derive the (anti)-actuality entailments?” on April 5-6.

UC Santa Cruz was well represented at the 38th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, held March 27-29 at the University of Maryland. A number of undergraduates and graduates were there to present their research, including Matthew Kogan, Joshua Lieberstein, Subhekshya Shrestha, and Ruoqing Yao. They were joined by current faculty members Dustin Chacón, Amanda Rysling, and Matt Wagers.

They ran into many grad alumni, including Jack Duff (PhD, 2023) and Duygu Demiray (MA, 2024), undergrad alumni/current Baggett Fellows Jackson Confer (BA, 2022) and Sadie Lewis (BA, 2023), as well as former LRC visitor Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv University). Two other slugs, 2011 BA alum Caroline Andrews (Zurich) and 2013 MA alum Adam Morgan (NYU Langone), anchored a well-attended and engaging plenary session featuring field psycholinguistics on the last day. They presented their research on case and sentence planning in Shipibo (Andrews) and the comprehension and production of switch reference in Nungon (Morgan). Despite the riveting science, it seems everyone found an opportunity to slip out in the warm weather to see the cherry blossoms or at least to rub Testudo for good luck.

Presentations by current members of the department: 

• “Subject islands are not caused by information structure clashes: cross-constructional evidence“, by first authors Matthew Kogan, Mandy Cartner (TAU), and Nikolas Webster and Matt Wagers and Ivy Sichel
• “Ambiguity advantage effect in wh-questions”, by first author Joshua Lieberstein and Matt Wagers
• “Now you see it… ? : Agreement sensitivity in ‘at-a-glance’ reading in Spanish”, by first author Subhekshya Shrestha and Dustin Chacón
• “Who gets to start the race? Distinguished referents in pronominal ambiguity resolution”, by first author Ruoqing Yao and Matt Wagers

and those by our alumni:

• “Eager interpretation of discourse-level ambiguities: New evidence for costly reanalysis”, by John Duff (Saarland; PhD, 2023) and Kelsey Sasaki (Oxford;  PhD, 2021) (with Daniel Altshuler)
• “Building a Cross-Linguistic Typology of Sentence Planning from Case Alignment”, by Caroline Andrews (Zurich; BA, 2011) (with Sebastian Sauppe, Roberto Zariquiey, and Balthasar Bickel)
• “Processing Switch Reference Marking in Nungon: Comprehension & Production Measures”, by Adam Morgan (NYU Langone;  MA, 2013) (with Jenny Yu, Ismael Dono, Lyn Ögate, and Hannah Sarvasy) 
• “From Single Words to Sentence Production: Shared Cortical Representations but Distinct Temporal Dynamics”, by Adam Morgan (NYU Langone; MA, 2013) (with Orrin Devinsky, Werner Doyle, Patricia Dugan, Daniel Friedman, and Adeen Flinker)
  

  UC Santa Cruz linguists at HSP 2025

From right to left: Junko Ito, Nick Kalivoda, Martin Krämer, Peter Svenonius, Maya Wax Cavarello, Armin Mester

On March 13–14, a group of Santa Cruz linguists participated in the workshop Exploring Boundaries: Phonological Domains in the Languages of the World, held at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø—the northernmost university in the world.

Professor Junko Ito and Professor Armin Mester gave a talk entitled “Prosodic Windows as Tonal Domains: The Case of Kagoshima Japanese”.

Current PhD student Maya Wax Cavallaro presented her work titled “Evidence for the Syllable in Domain Generalization”.

Junko, Armin, and Maya also reconnected with Martin Krämer (UCSC LRC Research Associate, 2015), now Professor in the Department of Language and Culture at UiT and a co-organizer of the workshop; Nick Kalivoda (PhD 2018), who presented on “Linear and Structural (A)symmetries in Syntax-Prosody Mapping”; and Peter Svenonius (PhD 1994), now Professor in the Department of Language and Culture at UiT, who presented on “Words, Phrases, and the ‘Accentual Complex’ in Iron Ossetic” (joint work with Patrik Bye).