Category: Student News

Goings-on in Gotham

Santa Cruz was well represented at NELS56, recently held at NYU (October 17-19, 2025).

Current and erstwhile slugs delivered at least four talks and four posters at this year’s edition of NELS:

Talks

  1. Yağmur Kiper, “Ellipsis as leverage for dependent case theory”
  2. Emily Knick, “Proximate futures in English and Turkish: An analogy between spatial and temporal proximity”
  3. Aidan Katson, “Expanding the nominal in English ACC- and POSS-ing nominalizations”
  4. Emilio Gonzalez, (UCSC B.A. ’22), now a graduate student in Linguistics at UCSD, “Condition A, logophors, and wh-movement”

Posters

  1. Emma Slater-Smith,”An Agree-based Account of PCC in English Double Object Constructions”
  2. Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv University), “Intra-sentential code switching at the syntax-prosody interface”, co-authored with Julia Horvath
  3. Niko Webster and Ivy Sichel, “Subject islands do not reduce to construction-specific discourse function”, co-authored with Mandy Cartner, Matthew Kogan, and Matt Wagers

Front (l to r): Sichel, Cartner & Gonzalez;
Back (“”): Katson, Slater-Smith, Webster, Kiper, Knick

Six Slugs A-sinnin’!

According to Wiktionary, a collective of slugs may be referred to as a cornucopia. With all due emphasis on that modal, there’s no denying that Banana Slugs were copious at last month’s edition of Sinn und Bedeutung. Held at Goethe University Frankfurt, SuB30 featured presentations from many community members:

You can see most of these folks pictured below!

(l to r): Sharf, Knick, Hofmann, Unidentified Frankfurter, Li, Tamura. Not pictured: Cao.

Banana Slugs at AMP 2025

This year’s Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2025) was held September 25–26 at UC Berkeley, and UCSC was well represented by both current graduate students and alumni.

Among our current grads, Jonathan Paramore gave a talk titled “Modeling Phonetic Neutralization in Exemplar Theory.” Hanyoung Byun presented “Lenis obstruent voicing in Seoul Korean: Phonological or phonetic?”. Hanyoung’s abstract was also selected for the Best Student Abstract Award. Larry Lyu presented a poster, “The local meets the non-local: assimilation-induced transparency in vowel harmony.”

Hanyoung Byun
Jonathan Paramore
Larry Lyu

We were also delighted to see several UCSC alumni at AMP this year, including Eric Baković (UC San Diego; BA 1993), Ben Eischens (UCLA; PhD 2022), Sara Finley (Pacific Lutheran University; BA 2003), Aaron Kaplan (University of Utah; PhD 2008), and Ben Sommer (BA 2025).

From left to right: Ben Sommer, Jonathan Paramore, Hanyoung Byun, Ben Eischens, Aaron Kaplan, Larry Lyu, Eric Baković

Paramore in Journal of the International Phonetic Association

PhD student Jonathan Paramore recently published an article in Journal of the International Phonetic Association titled “The acoustic correlates of word-level stress and focus-related prominence in Mankiyali,” coauthored with Aurangzeb, a native speaker of Mankiyali. Congratulations, Jonathan!

Abstract: This paper investigates the acoustic correlates of word-level stress and phrase-level focus-related prominence in Mankiyali, a highly endangered Indo-Aryan language spoken in Northwest Pakistan that utilizes a weight-sensitive stress system. Of the acoustic properties measured (duration, f0, intensity, spectral tilt, and vowel quality), duration was the only feature found to robustly and consistently correlate with word-level stress across syllable types. In contrast, phrase-level focus-related prominence corresponded to an amplification of all five acoustic features measured. Given that vowel duration serves a vital role in preserving lexical contrast in Mankiyali, these findings present difficulties for a strong version of the Functional Load Hypothesis, which claims that acoustic properties bearing a high functional load in a language will not be used to mark prominence. In addition, results support an analysis of Mankiyali’s stress system as having five distinct levels of weight, a pattern which is extremely rare, if not unattested, elsewhere in the world’s languages.

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”
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