Category: Student News

LURC 2025

The 2025 Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) took place on Friday, May 30. One of the longest running traditions in the Department, the conference featured the largest number of student presenters ever — 31! A total of 13 posters were presented by undergraduates on their original research across six subdisciplines: phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics, semantics, sociolinguistics, and syntax.

Every year, the conference features a Distinguished Alumnus/a Speaker, and this year was no exception. Anissa Zaitsu (BA, 2017; MA, 2018), currently a PhD student at Stanford, gave the keynote talk: “When negative concord fails: Focus, alternatives, and the semantics of double negation.”

Nikolas Webster Gave Invited Talk, Received Fellowship Awards

During May 9-10, PhD candidate Nikolas Webster visited the Department of Linguistics at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, to attend their Workshop on Nominals and Nominalization in Korean and Beyond. Niko gave an invited talk titled The internal arguments of Korean process nominals and complex predicates.

Niko giving his talk at UIUC

Niko also recently received two Presidential and Chancellor’s Dissertation Quarter Fellowship Awards from the UCSC Graduate Division, which will provide support for Fall 2025 and Winter 2026 to complete his dissertation. Congratulations, Niko! 

Successful BayPhon 2025

On May 10, 2025, UCSC Linguistics hosted BayPhon, a meeting that brought together about 35 faculty and students in the broader Bay area (San José State, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz) to present their work on phonetics and phonology. 

Those in attendance enjoyed a day of abundant sun, with exceptional views across Monterey Bay during lunch, and basked in the light of 11 inspiring presentations and warm conversations. Many thanks to the students and faculty who organized the event, especially the primary organizers: PhD students Hanyoung Byun, Richard Wang, and Professor Rachel Walker. 

UCSC researchers were among those presenting at the workshop:

  • Myke Brinkerhoff presented a talk titled “The acoustics landscape of voice quality.”
  • Hanyoung Byun presented a poster titled “Lenis obstruent voicing in Seoul Korean: Phonological or phonetic?”
  • Ian Carpick presented a talk titled “Deriving vowel reduction from a law governing human motion.”

Thanks to Jungu Kang for taking photos throughout the workshop. Some highlights are below:

  • PhD Student Ian Carpick
  • PhD Student Hanyoung Byun
  • PhD Student Myke Brinkerhoff
  • Professor Rachel Walker at the poster session with presenters

Nido de Lenguas at the Guelaguetza

Poster for the Guelaguetza

Nido de Lenguas continued its annual tradition of tabling at Senderos’ Vive Oaxaca Guelaguetza to raise public awareness about the Indigenous languages of Oaxaca. In addition to PhD students Max Kaplan, Matthew Kogan, and Maya Wax Cavallaro and undergraduate students Alexa Ballesteros and Jackie Torres (BA, Linguistics), this year’s team included students from the Estudiantes Oaxaqueños de Ahora, an interest group which aims to build a supportive community for Oaxacan students on campus. Its volunteers reported having a phenomenal time talking to guests about the languages and dialects they speak!

Raul Hernandez, Alexa Ballesteros, Jackie Torres, Lizbeth Ortiz, and Daisy Lopez (from left to right)
Raul Hernandez, Alexa Ballesteros, Jackie Torres, Lizbeth Ortiz, and Daisy Lopez (from left to right)
Nido de Lenguas table at the Guelaguetza
Nido de Lenguas table at the Guelaguetza
Maya Wax Cavallaro, Max Kaplan, Daisy Lopez, Alexa Ballesteros, Lizbeth Ortiz, and Jackie Torres (from left to right)
Maya Wax Cavallaro, Max Kaplan, Daisy Lopez, Alexa Ballesteros, Lizbeth Ortiz, and Jackie Torres (from left to right)
Nido de Lenguas table at the Guelaguetza
Nido de Lenguas table at the Guelaguetza
Matthew Kogan at the Nido de Lenguas table
Matthew Kogan at the Nido de Lenguas table

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.

Santa Cruz linguists at the poster session
Santa Cruz linguists at the conference dinner
Niko Webster presenting his poster
Mia Gong in front of her poster
Andrew Hedding helping put up Mia’s poster
Aidan Katson giving their talk

Banana Slugs moving on

As the academic year comes to a close, we’re proud to celebrate our graduating students and recent alumni as they embark on their next steps in linguistics and beyond. This year, Banana Slugs are headed to a variety of excellent graduate programs, fellowships, and professional opportunities. Whether continuing to pursue research in linguistics or exploring new paths and territories, our students carry with them the skill and curiosity honed at UCSC to their next chapters. Congratulations to all — we can’t wait to see where your journeys take you!

Katie Arnold, MA program at University of British Columbia

This fall, I will be joining the UBC Department of Linguistics as a MA student! I’ll be working with Dr. Anne-Michelle Tessier in her Child Phonology Lab. I’m looking forward to this opportunity to continue developing my research skills and learning about linguistics.

Katie Arnold

Jackson Confer, Baggett Fellowship and PhD Program at the University of Maryland 

After taking a break from my studies for a year, I decided to apply for the Baggett Fellowship at University of Maryland. After spending some time here, I completely fell in love with the department; when it came time to apply to grad schools this cycle, I already knew that I wanted to stay. I really appreciate the explicit marriage between formal and experimental approaches here and the extensive cross-talk that comes with that. In the fellowship, I’ve mostly been doing formal work on the syntax of exceptives and coordination, but I plan to add an experimental dimension to this work as I transition into the PhD program.

Jackson Confer

Andrew Kato, PhD Program at UCLA

With a strong history of research in formal semantics and the syntax-semantics interface, I’ll be heading to UCLA as a PhD student starting Fall ’25. The department’s large size even beyond its s-side faculty also makes for a good opportunity to explore lingering interests of mine in other subfields, mainly computational linguistics and philosophy of language.

Andrew Kato

Sadie Lewis, Baggett Fellowship at the University of Maryland, PhD program at University of Chicago

During my Baggett Fellowship I worked with Masha Polinsky mainly doing fieldwork on Kaqchikel (Mayan). I started working on negation in that language which was my main project. I stayed another semester on her grant “Variations in Exceptive Structures” and completed a project on Thai. Now I am working with Hedde Zeijlstra to work more on negation in Mayan. I will spend the summer in Göttingen and do some work on his ERC grant “Unpacking Paradigmatic Gaps”. Additionally, I have accepted a place at University of Chicago for a PhD in linguistics. I will start this Fall. I am hoping to work with Karlos (Arregi) and Erik (Zyman) and continue working on Kaqchikel.

Sadie Lewis

Akira Santerre, Certification of Pre-SLP at CSU San Marcos

Since I’m switching majors from Linguistics to Speech Language Pathology for my Master’s, I enrolled in a Certification of Pre-SLP at CSU San Marcos. It’s like a post-bacc. It’s nice because I can save money by completing all my prerequisite courses online. After I complete this, in a year, I’ll be all set to apply to a regular SLP master’s program. I’m hoping to get into CSU Long Beach. In the meantime, I’m planning to log some observation hours this summer!

Akira Santerre

Akira Santerre

Ivy Shaw, PhD in Romance Languages & Literatures at UC Berkeley 

I’m incredibly excited to be starting as a PhD student in the Romance Languages and Literatures program at UC Berkeley this fall! The program allows for a comparative study of the linguistics of three Romance Languages, while also developing an in-depth knowledge of a primary language, mine being French. The program is interdisciplinary in nature, and I was drawn to the flexibility of designing a unique and personalized course load with a diversity of linguistic topics and approaches suited to exactly what I want to study. I look forward to expanding on the research I did as an undergrad at UCSC in Old French syntax and also in L2 phonology. The faculty and resources offered at Berkeley are incredible and I couldn’t be happier to be continuing my study of linguistics there. 

Ivy Shaw

Successful 2025 Graduate Research Symposium

Our annual graduate student research and professionalization seminar, LING 290, culminated this year in a Spring Research Symposium held on Friday, April 11, in Humanities 2. The symposium showcased a wide range of ongoing research across subfields. The list of presenters included:

Session 1
– Yağmur Kiper, The semantics of the imperfectives in Turkish
– Emily Knick, Future reference and covert modality in Khalkha Mongolian
– Aidan Katson, Expanding the nominal in English ACC- and POSS-ing nominalizations

Session 2
– Ian Carpick, Deriving vowel reduction from a law governing human motion
– Larry Lyu, The local meets the non-local: assimilation-induced transparency in vowel harmony
– Hanyoung Byun, Interaction between consonant voicing and vowel devoicing in Seoul Korean

Session 3
– Ruoqing Yao, What gets to race? Distinguishedness effect on the ambiguity advantage effect
– Richard Wang, Investigating the role of duration in the categorization of Mandarin tone

Congratulations to all the participants in LING 290 for the excellent progress they’ve made on their research! A big thanks to Professor Rachel Walker, the instructor of the seminar, and all faculty members who have sat in the seminar to give valuable feedback on the presentations! (photo credit: Jungu Kang)

  • PhD student Yağmur Kiper
  • PhD student Ian Carpick
  • PhD student Ruoqing Yao
  • PhD student Aidan Katson
  • PhD student Larry Lyu
  • PhD student Richard Wang
  • PhD student Hanyoung Byun
  • Professor Rachel Walker

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