Category: Student News

Another successful LASC

On March 10, the Department hosted its annual Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference, attended by prospective graduate students and current students, faculty and alumni. The program included presentations by several graduate students and alumnus Rodrigo Gutiérrez Bravo, now Professor at El Colegio de México.

The student presentations showcased recent research going on in the department, and sparked lively and insightful discussion during the Q & A:

  • Jonathan Paramore led off the presentations with a talk on “Covert URs: evidence from Pakistani Punjabi”
  • Yaqing Cao followed with a talk on “Scope reconstruction in head movements as featural Valuations”
  • Matthew Kogan and Niko Webster presented a talk entitled “Subject islands are not reducible to discourse function”

The Distinguished Alumnus speaker was Professor Rodrigo Gutiérrez Bravo, who gave a talk entitled “Not in the complementizer system: Information Structure features in Spanish clefts and pseudo-clefts”, where he argued that structures which have a position that can show multiple informational properties can be particularly insightful for understanding the interaction between information structure and syntax.

The LASC dinner and celebration that followed at the Cowell Provost House featured delightful conversations, excellent food, and stunning views of the forest and ocean.

Thank you to all of the students, staff, and faculty who contributed to making this event a success!

  • Rodrigo Gutiérrez Bravo [credit: Jungu Kang]
  • Distinguished Alumnus Address — Rodrigo Gutiérrez Bravo
  • Jonathan Paramore [credit: Jungu Kang]
  • Yaqing Cao [credit: Jungu Kang]
  • Matthew Kogan and Niko Webster [credit: Jungu Kang]
  • Yağmur Kiper [credit: Jungu Kang]
  • Matt Wagers offering Closing Remarks [credit: Jungu Kang]
  • Left to right: Maziar Toosarvandani, Matthew Kogan, Matt Wagers, Ivy Sichel, Joshua Lieberstein [credit: Jungu Kang]

Banana Slugs at Tromsø Workshop on Phonological Domains

From right to left: Junko Ito, Nick Kalivoda, Martin Krämer, Peter Svenonius, Maya Wax Cavarello, Armin Mester

On March 13–14, a group of Santa Cruz linguists participated in the workshop Exploring Boundaries: Phonological Domains in the Languages of the World, held at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø—the northernmost university in the world.

Professor Junko Ito and Professor Armin Mester gave a talk entitled “Prosodic Windows as Tonal Domains: The Case of Kagoshima Japanese”.

Current PhD student Maya Wax Cavallaro presented her work titled “Evidence for the Syllable in Domain Generalization”.

Junko, Armin, and Maya also reconnected with Martin Krämer (UCSC LRC Research Associate, 2015), now Professor in the Department of Language and Culture at UiT and a co-organizer of the workshop; Nick Kalivoda (PhD 2018), who presented on “Linear and Structural (A)symmetries in Syntax-Prosody Mapping”; and Peter Svenonius (PhD 1994), now Professor in the Department of Language and Culture at UiT, who presented on “Words, Phrases, and the ‘Accentual Complex’ in Iron Ossetic” (joint work with Patrik Bye). 



Linguistics Students Recognized as 2024-2025 THI Undergraduate Research Fellows

The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz has announced its 2024-2025 Undergraduate Research Fellows, with 40% of the fellowship awarded to Linguistics students. Among them, Linguistics major Elliot-Elyjah McWhinnie received the Bertha N. Melkonian Prize for submitting the top research proposal. 

Congratulations to the following Linguistics students on their outstanding projects:

  • Katherine Arnold, Linguistics and Applied Linguistics & Multilingualism
    “Nonnative Perception of Italian Consonant Length Contrast”
  • Sam Beatty, Linguistics
    “Gendered voices and Transgender bodies: Where are we? What are we doing? And who are we talking to?”
  • Joshua Lieberstein, Linguistics
    “Verbless Clauses in Mayan K’iche’: A non-copular approach”
  • Elliot-Elyjah Mcwhinnie, Linguistics
    “Zooming in on the regional differences of African American Language in California”

Byun in Phonology

An article by PhD student Hanyoung Byun recently appeared in the journal Phonology. Coauthored with Jongho Jun, Seon Park, and Yoona Yee, it is entitled, “How tight is the link between alternations and phonotactics?”

This study tests the hypothesis that alternation patterns with strong lexical support are more robust than those with no, or weak, lexical support. Focusing on three alternation patterns in Korean with varying productivity and generality, we measured lexical support in two ways. First, we conducted an acceptability-rating experiment investigating Korean speakers’ judgements on non-words with and without violations of the phonotactic constraints motivating the alternations. In addition, we performed a simulation of learning a maximum entropy (MaxEnt) Harmonic Grammar from a dictionary corpus. The results of the experiment and computational modelling confirmed the hypothesis by showing that if an alternation is robust, its associated phonotactic constraint is learned with a high weight from the MaxEnt simulation, and it affects the participants’ well-formedness ratings for non-words. Consequently, the results of this research support the claim of a tight link between alternations and phonotactics.

Brinkerhoff and McGuire in JASA Express Letters

PhD student Myke Brinkerhoff and Professor Grant McGuire just saw an article, “Using residual H1* for voice quality research”, appear in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,  Express Letters.

One of the most common ways of assessing voice quality is through the spectral slope measure H1*–H2*. However, Chai and Garellek [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 152(3), 1856–1870 (2022)] propose and demonstrate the robustness of a new measure—residual H1*. In this study, we test the reliability of residual H1* in capturing voice quality contrasts in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec. We find that residual H1* is a more robust measure of voice quality than H1*–H2* and can capture the differences in voice quality in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec, which supports the use of this measure in voice quality research.

Paramore in Phonology

Fourth-year PhD student Jonathan Paramore had a journal article appear in Phonology in its latest issue: “Codas are universally moraic.”

Mismatches in weight criteria across weight-sensitive processes within individual languages present difficulties for theories of moraic structure, particularly regarding coda weight. Previous accounts, which stipulate that codas are variably moraic to account for the typological variation in the weight status of CVC for primary stress, make incorrect predictions for the status of CVC in other weight-sensitive phenomena, including tone, word minimality and secondary stress, among others. This article proposes a theory of Uniform Moraic Quantity coupled with a new syllable weight metric as a solution, which captures CVC’s flexible weight status while maintaining the cross-linguistic moraicity of codas and avoiding the incorrect predictions that frustrate the standard variable-weight approach.

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