Category: Faculty News

On Friday, December 7, a team of students, faculty, and friends was honored to present a Festschrift celebrating the remarkable careers of Junko Ito and Armin Mester, two of the world’s leading theoretical phonologists and one of the most enduring collaborative research teams in our field:

https://itomestercelebration.sites.ucsc.edu/

Festschrift editor Jaye Padgett writes:

It is impossible to do justice to the variety and depth of Armin and Junko’s work, or to adequately express our regard for them as colleagues and friends. But we hope this volume goes some way toward doing both.

The editors of the Festschrift are Ryan Bennett, Andrew Angeles, Adrian Brasoveanu, Dhyana Buckley, Nick Kalivoda, Shigeto Kawahara, Grant McGuire, Jaye Padgett.

Pictured from right to left: Grant McGuire, Adrian Brasoveanu, Armin Mester, Jaye Padgett, Junko Ito, Ryan Bennett, Andrew Angeles, and Nick Kalivoda.

A paper by assistant professor Ryan Bennett has recently appeared in Glossa. The paper, entitled “Recursive prosodic words in Kaqchikel (Mayan),” argues that the prefixal phonology of Kaqchikel provides evidence for unbounded recursion of the prosodic word ω. The paper can be accessed here.

On June 1, Ivy Sichel and Maziar Toosarvandani gave a talk on “Attraction and pronoun movement in Sierra Zapotec” at the 2nd Symposium on Oaxacan Linguistics at UCLA. This conference had its first iteration at UCSC last year, sponsored by the Workshop on the Languages of Meso-America (WLMA). This year’s SOL — its new acronym — was well attended, and the conference looks to become a more permanent fixture in the California Oaxacanist community. Next year’s SOL is planned to take place at Cal State LA.