Category: Student News

Spring 2025 End-of-year celebration

On Thursday, June 12, the Linguistics Department held its End-of-Year Celebration in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge for our graduating students. The event brought together faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, friends, and family from across the UCSC linguistics community.

Here are a few highlights from the celebration:

  • Undergraduate Advising and Program Coordinator Gwyn Vandevere
  • Professor and Undergraduate Program Director Maziar Toosarvandani
  • Professor and Department Chair Matt Wagers

 

 

More Banana Slugs moving on

Alexa Ballesteros, graduating with a double major in Linguistics and Spanish Studies, is headed to Valencia, Spain this fall to participate in the North American Language and Culture Assistants Program (NALCAP). As part of the program, she will assist in teaching English at an elementary school. Until her departure in September, Alexa is continuing her work as a research assistant with Professor Kim Helmer, contributing to The Happiness Project, an initiative aimed at improving the educational experience and mental well-being of international students. 

Millie Hacker

Millie Hacker, who is graduating with a BA in Linguistics, will be starting a PhD in Linguistics at Michigan State University, focusing on phonology and its interfaces with phonetics and sociolinguistics. Millie expects to be involved with the Michigan Diaries corpus project and analyzing longitudinal sound changes from its participants.

Congratulations, Alexa and Millie!

 

Successful end-of-the-year defenses

The final week of the quarter brought a flurry of successful defenses across all levels—dissertations, QP2s, and QP1s. Congratulations to all who reached these important milestones!

Dissertations

  • Myke Brinkerhoff, “Voice Quality and Laryngeal Complexity in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec”
  • Yaqing Cao, “Scope Reconstruction in Head Movement”

QP2s

  • Ian Carpick, “Deriving Vowel Reduction from a Law Governing Human Motion”
  • Richard Wang, “Investigating the role of duration in the categorization of Mandarin tone”

QP1s

  • Hanyoung Byun, “Interaction between consonant voicing and vowel devoicing in Seoul Korean”
  • Aidan Katson,“Expanding the nominal in English ACC- and POSS-ing nominalizations”
  • Emily Knick, “Future reference and covert modality in Khalkha Mongolian”
  • Ruoqing Yao, “Who and when gets to race? The distinguishedness effect in pronominal ambiguity resolution”

Spring 2025 Linguistics Honors

Several seniors were awarded honors in Spring 2025 in the Linguistics major:

  • Cal Boye-Lynn
  • Mesa Diehl
  • AJ Kim
  • Yuki Koch
  • Josh Lieberstein
  • Matthew Vasser

In particular, Sam Beatty received Highest Honors in Linguistics.

Congratulations to all!

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.”

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