Category: Student News

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

linguistics undergrad research featured on university news

In a recent post on the University News, two linguistics projects led by faculty members Jaye Padgett (Production of English /r/ by prosodic position, with undergrad RAs: Claire Wellwood, Max Xie, and Tony Butorovich), and Rachel Walker (Syllable Structure in Dialects of English) were featured as part of the bigger showcase of Humanities-funded undergraduate projects.

 

You can read the news post here.

Successful 2024 Graduate Research Symposium

Our annual graduate student research and professionalization seminar, LING 290, culminated this year in two installments of the Spring Research Symposium on Friday, April 19, and Friday, April 26. The list of presenters includes:

April 19

April 26

Congratulations to all the participants in LING 290 for the wonderful progress they’ve made on their research! A big thanks to faculty Roumi Pancheva, who is the instructor of the seminar, and all faculty members who have sat in the seminar to give valuable feedback on the presentations!

  • Ian Carpick

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