Category: Student News

Tamura and Webster at SICOGG/WAFL

Image of Jun Tamura, Haoze Li, and Niko Webster (from left to right)

Jun Tamura, Haoze Li, and Niko Webster (from left to right)

Over the summer, PhD students Jun Tamura and Niko Webster traveled to Jeonju, South Korea to attend a joint meeting of the Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar and the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics, which took place at Jeonbuk National University in August. Niko presented a talk titled “Acategorial licensing of internal arguments in Korean”. Jun presented a solo talk on “Superlatives without degree abstraction: Ichiban superlatives in Japanese,” as well as a joint talk with Professor Haoze Li, a recent Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department and now Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University.

Ian Carpick at LabPhon

In late June, PhD Student Ian Carpick attended the 19th Conference on Laboratory Phonology: LabPhon 19 in Korea, where he presented his poster, “Learned performance or auditory bias: carryover vs. anticipatory nasal coarticulation,” based on his first Qualifying Paper (QP) project. Shortly after, Ian successfully defended his QP by Zoom. The committee comprised Ryan Bennett, Grant McGuire, and Amanda Rysling, who chaired the QP. Congratulations, Ian!

Maya Wax Cavallaro in Guatemala, Mexico

This summer, PhD student Maya Wax Cavallaro spent three weeks in San Pedro la Laguna, Sololá, Guatemala, conducting fieldwork on Tz’utujil (a Mayan language). Then, Maya spent another three weeks in Santiago Laxopa, Oaxaca, Mexico, studying Santiago Laxopa Zapotec (an Otomanguean language). During her time in these regions, she collected data for her dissertation, focusing on the phonetic and phonological processes involved in the devoicing of domain-final sonorant consonants. 

(Maya in Guatemala)

(Maya in Oaxaca)

Slugs’ post-grad plans

M.A. student Duygu Demiray accepted an offer to join the Linguistics Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (UMass) to pursue their Ph.D. study.

Max Xie (B.A. 2024) will continue his studies at San Francisco State University in the MA program in English: Concentration in Linguistics.

Colin Hirschberg (B.A. 2023) accepted an offer from Rutgers University to pursue a Ph.D. in Linguistics.

Ashley Ippolito (B.A. 2022) will be joining the Fall 2024 cohort of doctoral students at Florida State for their upcoming Triple L doctoral leadership grant project researching language and literacy development with an emphasis on multilingual learners with the first cohort project focused on Morphological Awareness Pathway to Reading (MAP-R).

Many congrats, and wishing all the graduating slugs the best in their future endeavors!

Spring field methods class

Offered in alternating years, this year’s Field Methods class, taught by Assistant Prof. Mia Gong, focused on Khalkha Mongolian. The class worked with one speaker, Enja Volodya, in the Bay Area. Elicitations took place in various forms (virtual and in-person) and locations (campus and Los Gatos Public Library), which provided essential training for the class to adapt to different situations conducting fieldwork.

We thank the speaker for her valuable contribution and look forward to the meaningful work to come out in the future!

Class photo (from left to right): (back row) Larry Lyu, Ian Carpick, Aidan Katson, Emily Knick, Ruoqing Yao, Richard Wang, Andrew Kato; (front row) Yağmur Kiper, Enja Volodya, Hanyoung Byun Mia Gong (not pictured)

Successful LURC 2024

On June 7, the annual Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) took place at the London Nelson Center in downtown Santa Cruz. LURC showcases a variety of linguistic research by UCSC undergraduates majoring in Language Studies and Linguistics.

This year’s LURC features nine posters:

  • Monique Aingworth, Julia Helmer, Grace Nighswonger: The impact of coordination ambiguity on garden path sentences
  • Amenia Denson: Mixed directionality in A’ingae nasal spreading
  • Samuel Almer: Pre-nasal raising patterns in California English
  • Killian Kiuttu: Color harmony in Dolgan
  • Amanda Pollem, E.Z. Dashiell, Jennifer Hernandez, Jordy Chanon, Valen Munson: Specificity and constraint in word prediction
  • Cal Boye-Lynn: Chasing phantoms of auditory bias
  • Andrew Kato: Restricting the scope of a relative measure
  • Millie Hacker: The gradual deletion hypothesis: Evidence from variable denasalization in Hixkaryana
  • Benjamin Sommer, Samuel Almer, Michael Proctor (Macquarie University), Rachel Walker (Faculty): Annotating acoustic speech data with MATLAB tools

This year’s distinguished alumni speaker is Prof. Kirby Conrod (BA, 2011, now Assistant Prof. at Swarthmore College), who gave a talk titled “Pronoun Euphoria”.

Congrats to everyone on their achievement, and thank you to all the faculty and volunteers who contributed to organizing the conference!

  • Prof Matt Wagers giving an opening speech as the department chair

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