WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Fourth year PhD student Vishal Arvindam received the inaugural 2022 Gibson/Fedorenko Young Scholar Award. The prize, which honors two young scholars who have presented an outstanding talk at the Conference on Human Sentence Processing, comes with $1,000. Vishal’s talk (in collaboration with Matt Wagers) was entitled “Anti-local anaphors in Telugu are subject to local antecedent interference.”
Congratulations, Vishal!
The Department’s faculty and students saw a number of their publications appear in print over the summer, including:
Today marks the annual meeting of the Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC). This year’s lineup featured four excellent talks by our undergraduates: (1) Animacy in Globally Ambiguous Sentences, by Briana Bugarin, Jackson Confer, Joyce Hong, Owen O’Brien, and Isabel Pacheco, (2) Local Syntactic Coherence Effects across Lexical Categories, by Sarah Lee, Sadira Lewis, Haley Okumura, (3) T-Glottalization in Utahn English, by Kim Tan, and (4) English Inversion and the EPP, by Emilio Gonzalez. All of this was followed up by another talk by distinguished alum Eric Baković: Vowel Harmony Functions, Complexity, and Interactions. The conference was a great success, and WHASC extends a congratulations and a thank you to everyone who organized and/or participated in this event. The full details can be found here.
The department is excited to welcome five incoming students next year: Ian Carpick, Richard Wang, and Sebahat Yağmur Kiper (PhD track) and Larry Lyu and Duygu Demiray (MA track). Their bios are attached below. Welcome, everyone!
Ian Carpick holds a BA in Linguistics from the University of British Columbia. His main interest is in the architecture of theoretical frameworks such as Optimality Theory, as well as theoretical phonology more generally, and long-distance interactions. His undergraduate thesis surveyed approaches to non-local dissimilation of nasal + obstruent clusters in the Austronesian languages Mori Bawah and Timugon Murut, and the Australian language Gurindji.
Duygu Demiray holds a BA in Linguistics from Boğaziçi University. Their research interests cluster around psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and theoretical linguistics. Their BA thesis, “Estimating the Effect of Uninformed Responses: Application of an MPT Model,” applied a Bayesian MPT model on sentences processing results from Turkish to explore the effects of uninformed responses on experimental results.
Yağmur Kiper received a BA in Foreign Language Education and an MA in English Language Teaching from Middle East Tech University. Her main interest is in theoretical syntax. Her MA thesis, “In the Case of Sluicing,” sought to build unified analyses of sluicing in Turkish regardless of the clause type.
Larry Lyu is completing a BA in Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His interest in the interaction of phonology and phonetics with historical linguistic theory and historical data has led him to explore diachronic sound change and high vowel fricativization in such languages as his native Nantong. In his free time, he collaborates with various activist groups on the documentation and revitalization of endangered languages.
Richard Wang is currently pursuing a BA and MA in Linguistics from UCLA. His interest in phonetics has led him to explore the phonetic cues to prosodic structures across languages, and his research in phonology has used OT to investigate the prosody of rhotic lenition in Mandarin. He would like to perform fieldwork on prosody, especially in the American Indigenous languages, Austronesian languages, and understudied Chinese varieties.
Matthew Kogan, current B.A. student in Linguistics was recently awarded a 2021-2022 THI Undergraduate Research Fellowship ($1000) for his project “When Complexity Becomes too Complex: Agreement Attraction in Embedded Questions.”
We look forward to hearing the results of his project at the 2022 Humanities Spring Awards ceremony.
Andrew Hedding and Maziar Toosarvandani presented at NELS 52 this weekend, which was held (virtually) at Rutgers.
Andrew gave a talk titled Possible and Impossible Movements within the Mixtec DP, about pied-piping with inversion and subextraction in San Martín Peras Mixtec and what these phenomena can tell us about the way that foci move syntactically.
Maziar gave a talk titled Locating Animacy in the Grammar, on the relationship between person features and animacy through the lens of Sierra Zapotec.
Fourth-year graduate student Morwenna Hoeks advanced to candidacy in September with a Qualifying Exam defense on a paper entitled “Decomposing the focus effect: Evidence from reading”. Congratulations, Morwenna!