Category: Faculty News

UC Santa Cruz Linguists at CreteLing

There was a large UCSC contingent at CreteLing 2022 this year, the annual linguistics summer school hosted at the University of Crete in beautiful Rethymno. Two current faculty members, Professors Ivy Sichel and Donka Farkas, and incoming faculty member Professor Roumyana Pancheva, taught classes over the two-week program. Nine students from UCSC, both undergraduate and graduate, attended these classes and others. Here are some quotes from participants about their favorite part of the program:

UCSC linguists at the Port of Rethymno

UCSC students and professors at the Port of Rethymno. From left clockwise: Owen O’Brien (senior), Sophia Stremel (PhD), Sadie Lewis (senior), Donka Farkas (faculty), Eli Sharf (PhD), Jackson Confer (alum), Matthew Kogan (MA), Roumyana Pancheva (faculty), Ivy Sichel (faculty), and Niko Webster (PhD).

“Easily, the best part was getting to know so many brilliant professors and students from around the world, both in the classroom and out. Conversations with new friends were consistently insightful and rewarding, and I loved being able to explore the island during down time and end the days with good food and night swims in such great company.” – Jackson Confer, alum

“At CreteLing, I enjoyed many of the meals we shared together, lunch between classes, and late-night dinners, where everyone was welcome and we seemed to keep cramming chairs around the table. Some of the most exciting conversations were had over a great meal and a view of the Mediterranean.” – Sadie Lewis, senior

“I really enjoyed going out with our big Santa Cruz cohort to enjoy the tremendous food and culture in Crete. I was quite excited to be thinking about Linguistics with everyone in this very vacation-esque setting.” – Matthew Kogan, 2nd year MA

Donka and Sabine at the final dinner.

Donka Farkas, Professor Emerita at UCSC and Sabine Iatridou, Professor at MIT and Co-Director of CreteLing

“It was pure joy to be in a real classroom with real live students again.  I loved interacting with the large and lively UCSC contingent, in class, at Brew your Mind cafe, on the bus, or even during a brief forced march from the classroom to the bus station.” – Donka Farkas, Professor Emerita

“I enjoyed dancing: whether in the club or in the streets!” – Owen O’Brien, senior

“Wednesday was our off-day in the middle of the week. I loved going to the local beach and swimming in the warm Mediterranean on this day, having some time to enjoy the sun and think about ideas I learned in class the previous few days.” – Eli Sharf, 2nd year PhD 

Delaney Gomez-Jackson on a bus.

UCSC MA student Delaney Gomez-Jackson enjoying the bus ride back to downtown Rethymno after a long day of classes

UCSC linguists at the Final Dinner

UCSC students celebrating at the dinner and dance party hosted on the final night of the program. From left clockwise: Sadie Lewis (senior), Sophia Stremel (PhD), Matthew Kogan (MA), Jackson Confer (alum), Owen O’Brien (senior), Elifnur Ulusoy (MA), Niko Webster (PhD), and Eli Sharf (PhD).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pictures of the University of Crete

A collage of film photos of the Rethymno campus taken by Delaney Gomez-Jackson.

Hangout out in Crete

Niko Webster (left), Owen O’Brien (right, back), and Sadie Lewis (right, front) hang out and drink coffee in front of the common room during a class break.

 

 

 

 

 

Syntax & Semantics at Santa Cruz, Volume 5 released

SynSem at UCSC Vol 5

The cover of Volume V of Syntax & Semantics at Santa Cruz

The fifth volume of Syntax & Semantics at Santa Cruz (SASC) — the Department’s working paper series on syntax and semantics — was just released. Edited by PhD students Lalitha Balachandran and Jack Duff, it features four articles by current and recently graduated students and faculty:

The volume is available both online and in print.

Summer research update: Zapotec Language Project

Members of Zapotec Lg. Project

Zapotec Language Project team members in Santiago Laxopa in July 2022: Myke Brinkerhoff, Maya Wax Cavallaro, Delaney Gomez-Jackson, Maziar Toosarvandani, and Jack Duff (from left to right).

This summer, linguists working on the Zapotec Language Project traveled to Santiago Laxopa in the Sierra Norte mountains of Oaxaca for the first time since 2019, to work with speakers of the Zapotec language spoken there (Dille’ xhunh).

The first team, comprised of fifth year PhD student Jack Duff, MA student Delaney Gomez-Jackson, and Professor Maziar Toosarvandani, carried out an eyetracking study on the interpretation of relative clauses, in collaboration with language expert Fe Silva-Robles. This project was supported by a National Science Foundation grant, directed by Toosarvandani with Professors Ivy Sichel and Matt Wagers, which is also supporting a range of other activities in the Department on resumption and animacy.

Members of the team also met one on one with speakers to investigate different aspects of Zapotec grammar and made recordings of narratives.

Jack and Delaney

Jack Duff (left) and Delaney Gomez-Jackson (right) painting a sign in Zapotec, which eventually will read De’nh tsekwelle’ nakenh lalldo’ yell tsedzu (Music is the soul of our town)

As service to the community, they taught math classes for the town’s children in Spanish and Zapotec and supported Silva Robles as she led reading and writing workshops for the language. As part of these workshops, the team presented the town with an alphabet poster featuring a preliminary orthography for their Zapotec language, as well as three illustrated books and (hand painted) signs using the orthography. These gifts contributed to the town’s ongoing conversations about how best to write its language.

A second team, comprised of fourth years PhD students Myke Brinkerhoff and Maya Wax Cavallaro, collected data for phonetic and phonological projects on tone and phonation. They also recorded narratives, vocabulary related to healing plants, recipes, and a description of how to make capisallos (multipurpose textiles made from palm leaves). Wax Cavallaro also had the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of previous UC Santa Cruz grad students, playing in the town’s banda during the annual fiesta.

Maya and Myke

Myke Brinkhoff (back center) and Maya Wax Cavallaro (right) recording (and learning) how to make yetgu’ (tamales) from Olivia Maldonado Maldonado

Summer Research Update: Bennett in Guatemala

Professor Ryan Bennett returned to Guatemala this summer, and he sent in this report:

“In mid-June, I returned to Guatemala, for the first time since 2019, to carry out fieldwork on Uspanteko, an endangered Mayan language with fewer than 6000 speakers. While there, my collaborators and I at the University of Arizona (Robert Henderson and Megan Harvey) presented the results of our recently-completed National Science Foundation grant on the sound structure of Uspanteko to the Uspanteko community in a one-day workshop.

I also just returned from MIT, where I presented a colloquium on vowel reduction in Uspanteko, drawing on data collected as part of the same NSF grant.”

Professor Roumyana Pancheva joins the department

Roumyana Pancheva, who is currently Professor of Linguistics and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California, will be joining the Department of Linguistics in Winter 2023.

Professor Pancheva’s research is in syntax, semantics, and their interface. She uses formal models to investigate synchronic linguistic variation and diachronic change, with a particular focus on Bulgarian and other Slavic languages. Professor Pancheva has made important contributions to the theories of degree expressions, person and perspective, tense and aspect, evidentiality, and clitics and clause structure. Her research is also innovative for integrating formal modeling with experimental methods, in particular brain imaging.

Her papers have appeared in a range of influential journals, including Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, the Journal of Semantics, and Brain and Language. Professor Pancheva has been supported by a prestigious New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation, as well as grants from the National Science Foundation.

Congratulations, Roumi, and welcome to Santa Cruz!

Summer publications

The Department’s faculty and students saw a number of their publications appear in print over the summer, including:

Vincent, Sichel, and Wagers in Languages

An update from Jake Vincent:

Ivy, Matt, and I had an article published in Languages recently (May 11). It’s based on the experimental work on English relative clauses (RCs) that started with my second QP and culminated in my dissertation. It presents experimental evidence that non-presuppositional environments affect a relative clause’s resistance to extraction even in English. In particular, (a) RCs inside of DPs serving as non-verbal predicates of a clause and RCs inside the nominal pivot of a there-existential give rise to a substantially reduced island effect (compared to extraction from a transitive object), and (b) RCs inside of transitive objects may give rise to a reduced island effect when the transitive verb is used in an existential way. The paper also describes what we believe to be a methodological innovation somewhat akin to priming by which the effects of discourse context on sentence acceptability can be measured without modifying the nature of the judgment task.

Congrats, Jake, Matt, and Ivy!

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