Category: Faculty News

Faculty Ryan Bennett received prestigious humanities teaching award

On June 6, faculty Ryan Bennett was awarded the prestigious Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award in Humanities at the UCSC Humanities Spring Award ceremony in the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. This award is sponsored by the Professor Emeritus of American Studies, John Dizikes. Many linguistics faculties have been awarded this distinguished award in the past, including Jaye Padgett (2006), Jorge Hankamer (2011),  Donka Farkas (2013), Pranav Anand (2016), and Jim McCloskey (2018).

 

Many congrats, Ryan!

linguistics undergrad research featured on university news

In a recent post on the University News, two linguistics projects led by faculty members Jaye Padgett (Production of English /r/ by prosodic position, with undergrad RAs: Claire Wellwood, Max Xie, and Tony Butorovich), and Rachel Walker (Syllable Structure in Dialects of English) were featured as part of the bigger showcase of Humanities-funded undergraduate projects.

 

You can read the news post here.

Chacón to join department in 2024-25

Dustin Chacón, currently an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Georgia, will be joining the department as an Assistant Professor in the 2024-25 academic year. Dustin’s central area of research is syntactic processing, grammar-parser relations, language variation, language acquisition, and South Asian languages.

 

Congrats, Dustin, and welcome to Santa Cruz!

Walker gave an invited talk at OCP21

Faculty Rachel Walker was an invited speaker at the Old World Conference in Phonology (OCP) 21 at Leipzig University on February 14-16. She presented a talk titled “Stressed syllables are not singled out for transparency: A gestural account” (see slides).
As an anecdote, the conference included a tour of a cemetery in Leipzig of tombstones for scholars who made historical contributions to the study of linguistics and language (see pictures below). Some of the renowned names are August Leskien, Wilhelm Streitberg, Eduard Sievers, and Wilhelm Wundt.

Walker published in Italian Journal of Linguistics

Faculty Rachel Walker and collaborator Yifan Yang have a recent article titled “Consonant Phonotactics in the Moenat Variety of Ladin” appearing in the Italian Journal of Linguistics.

Here is the paper abstract:

This paper provides a study of consonant phonotactics in the present-day Moenat variety of Ladin. This research focuses on the speech of the current generation of younger adults, based on an investigation with a primary consultant and acoustic recordings of multiple speakers. This work systematically investigates singleton consonants and consonant clusters in each position in the word (initial, medial, final) with accompanying illustrations in example words. An accompanying archive of sound files exemplifies the production of each word by two native speakers, one male and one female. Several phonological patterns involving consonants are discussed, including voicing agreement and place neutralization in preconsonantal sibilants, final obstruent devoicing, and nasal place assimilation. In addition, variation in the realization of sibilants is identified.

1 2 3 4 5 … 52