WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Professor Adrian Brasoveanu recently presented joint work with Jakub Dotlačil at the Computational Psycholinguistics Meeting (CPL 2025), held December 18-19, 2025 in Utrecht. The project is entitled “The Learnability of Model-Theoretic Interpretation Functions in Neural Networks”. Professor Brasoveanu led the development of the research project and attended remotely, with Professor Dotlačil participating on site.
Materials from the presentation are available here:
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.
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)
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.
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
Posters
Front (l to r): Sichel, Cartner & Gonzalez;
Back (“”): Katson, Slater-Smith, Webster, Kiper, Knick
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.
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