Anand, Hardt, and McCloskey in LI

The most recent issue of Linguistic Inquiry (volume 56, issue 2) has just appeared and it contains a paper by Professors Pranav Anand, Dan Hardt, and Jim McCloskey called “The Domain of Formal Matching in Sluicing.” This paper, like the 2019 paper by Deniz Rudin (PhD, 2018; USC) that it replies to and builds on (“Head-Based Syntactic Identity in Sluicing,” which also appeared in Linguistic Inquiry), emerged from the Santa Cruz Ellipsis Project, a project funded by the National Science Foundation which was active in the department between 2013 and 2019.

Santa Cruz linguists at WCCFL

The 43rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 43) took place a couple weekends ago at the University of Washington (April 25-27), with several Santa Crucians in attendance.

PhD student Aidan Katson gave a talk on Korean honorification as a window to understanding animacy,” while PhD student Niko Webster presented a poster on “The syntactic and semantic introduction of internal arguments.” Professor Mia Gong gave a talk on “Specification of D Derives Variation in Relative Clauses” (with Eszter Ótott-Kovács) and presented a poster, “Scrambling through the Looking Glass: Two Types of Movement across Weak Islands.” Professor Maziar Toosarvandani was also in attendance as an audience member.

The Santa Cruz students and faculty got a chance to catch up with some past members of the department. Professor Ruth Kramer (PhD, 2009; Georgetown) gave a talk on “Passivization, speech act participants, and third-person probes in Jarawara” (with Luke Adamson). Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv), a recent visitor in the Department, co-presented a talk, “The bilingual lexicon under Distributed Morphology: An investigation of gender agreement in code-switching.” Professor Andrew Hedding (PhD, 2022), now an Assistant Professor at UW, was on hand as one of the conference’s organizers.

Colloquium: Matt Wagers

Last Friday, the Department held a colloquium with Professor Matt Wagers as the invited speaker. Matt’s talk was entitled “Setting healthy (mnemonic) boundaries”:

Nearly 20 years ago, Lewis & Vasishth (2005) applied the ACT-R modeling framework to language processing by creating an English parser fragment embedded in an associative memory. McElree (2000) and McElree, Foraker & Dyer (2003) informed this development by providing earlier arguments in favor of such a content-addressable memory. This proved to be hugely influential because it offered a general theory of dependency resolution which could be made precise by reference to any particular theory of linguistic features. Both strands of thought reoriented thinking in the field away from models of working memory that required serial search procedures and, generally, the discovery of widespread interference effects has vindicated that shift. Much recent research has made progress in delineating what the representations are (Yadav et al. 2023, Keshev et al. 2025) and how they can be learned in an unsupervised manner (Ryu & Lewis 2021). Relatively unexplored is how to characterize the information that can be attended to simultaneously, sometimes called the “focus of attention” (Oberauer & Hein 2012). This is an important commitment of models like ACT-R and provides an attractive point of articulation to theories of locality or linguistic domains. In this talk, I will survey what we know (and don’t know) about the focus of attention in language processing (Wagers & McElree 2013, 2022) and relate it to recent thinking about the dynamics of context encoding (Healey, Long & Kahana 2019; Balachandran, Wagers & Rich 2025).

After the colloquium, students and faculty took a walk down by the ocean at the Coastal Sciences Campus, where a pod of whales was spotted, as well as at least one otter (photo courtesy of Jungu Kang).

A sea otter

Banana Slugs at GLOW, PLC, and TEAL

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.

Walker in Japan

On March 25, Professor Rachel Walker gave a talk at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) titled “Stress and non-transparency in vowel harmony: The role of prosodic gestures and locality.” Rachel’s trip coincided with cherry blossom (sakura) season in Tokyo! 

UC Santa Cruz reunion dinner after Professor Walker's talk

UC Santa Cruz reunion dinner

A reunion dinner for UC Santa Cruz folks took place after Rachel’s talk. In attendance were PhD alumni Motoko Katayama (1998), Maho Morimoto (2020), and Philip Spaelti (1997), as well as Professor Emerita Junko Ito and Haruo Kubozono (Visiting Scholar, 1994-95, currently Professor Emeritus at NINJAL).

Cherry blossoms in Tokyo

Banana Slugs at HSP

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: 

and those by our alumni:

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