Category: Student News

SLUG SPRING MILESTONES

Congratulations to Tom Roberts who successfully defended his QP 2 on May 4. His project is entitled “Pragmatic licensing of Estonian biased polar questions: An experimental study.” His committee included Donka Farkas (chair), Adrian Brasoveanu, and Amanda Rysling. Congratulations Tom!

Congratulations to Lydia Werthen who successfully defended her MA Thesis on May 16. Her project is entitled “Interrogative Continuation: A neglected puzzle.” Her committee included Jim McCloskey (chair), Donka Farkas, and Ryan Bennett. Congratulations Lydia!

Congratulations to Anissa Zaitsu who successfully defended her MA Thesis on . Her project is entitled “Why make sense of silence: The clausal syntax of a reduced why question.” Her committee included Jim McCloskey (chair), Jorge Hankamer, and Pranav Anand. Congratulations Anissa!

Congratulations to Mansi Desai who successfully defended her MA Thesis on June 5th. Her project is entitled “Polarity and Probing: Building Clauses in Gujarati” Her committee included Jim McCloskey (chair), Jorge Hankamer, and Maziar Toosarvandani. Congratulations Mansi!

ZAITSU TO MARYLAND

Congratulations to Anissa Zaitsu, who, having successfully defended her MA thesis on May 22nd, has been offered and has accepted a Baggett Fellowship in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland. Anissa will hold the fellowship for the academic year 2018-19 and will principally be working (with a group which includes Valentine Hacquard, Jeff Lidz, and Alexander Williams) on covert expressions of modality, one of the major themes in her thesis research. Best of luck, Anissa!

 

BENNETT IN LABPHON

A joint paper by assistant professor Ryan Bennett, Kevin Tang (Zhejiang University), and Juan Ajsivinac Sian has recently appeared in Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon). The paper, entitled “Statistical and acoustic effects on the perception of stop consonants in Kaqchikel (Mayan),” makes several proposals about phoneme representation and speech perception through an investigation of plain, ejective, and implosive stops in Kaqchikel, using experimental and corpus methodologies.

RUDIN AT SALT

The UCSC linguistics department dispatched intrepid reporter Deniz Rudin to cover the 28th annual Semantics And Linguistic Theory conference, which was hosted this year by MIT (in addition to his journalistic duties, he presented a poster on Rising Imperatives — attendees listened with measured politeness). Impressive presentations were delivered on a wide variety of topics, several of which didn’t even mention covert exhaustification or grammaticized implicature generation, and much collegial merriment was observed, the culmination of which was a reception, dinner, and karaoke session held in the MIT museum. Bonds of mutual professiono-personal regard were cemented that will presumably endure for a lifetime. Thanks to the organizers, and looking forward to next year!

WERTHEN IN THE MAGIC FLUTE

MA student Lydia Werthen will be performing next week in the chorus of UCSC’s production of Mozart’s famous opera “The Magic Flute.” The production features costume design in collaboration with Academy of Arts University and sets and lighting by Legend Theatrical. Bruce Kiesling conducts the UCSC orchestra and singers, and Sheila Willey directs. It will be sung in German with English dialogues and English supertitles. Lydia invites everyone to attend – seats are filling up quickly, get your ticket here (students $5, faculty $18).

RUDIN DISSERTATION DEFENSE

Deniz Rudin will be defending his dissertation at 11:00am on Friday, June 1st, in HUM 1 Room 210. Deniz’s dissertation is titled “A Tale of Two Contours.” The committee consists of Pranav Anand (chair), Donka Farkas, Adrian Brasoveanu, Cleo Condoravdi (Stanford), and Dan Lassiter (Stanford).

OSTROVE DISSERTATION DEFENSE

Jason Ostrove will be defending his dissertation at 10:00am on Monday, May 28th, in HUM 1 Room 210. Jason’s dissertation is titled “When phi-agreement targets topics: The view from San Martín Peras Mixtec.” The committee consists of Jim McCloskey (chair), Sandy Chung, Ryan Bennett, and Ruth Kramer (Georgetown).

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