WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
On Friday, June 6 2025, Myke Brinkerhoff successfully defended his dissertation, entitled “Voice Quality and Laryngeal Complexity in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec”, in HUM1-210. Congratulations, Myke!
Myke Brinkerhoff at his defense [photo credit: Jungu Kang]
Several seniors were awarded honors in Spring 2025 in the Linguistics major:
In particular, Sam Beatty received Highest Honors in Linguistics.
Congratulations to all!
The 2025 Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) took place on Friday, May 30. One of the longest running traditions in the Department, the conference featured the largest number of student presenters ever — 31! A total of 13 posters were presented by undergraduates on their original research across six subdisciplines: phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics, semantics, sociolinguistics, and syntax.
Every year, the conference features a Distinguished Alumnus/a Speaker, and this year was no exception. Anissa Zaitsu (BA, 2017; MA, 2018), currently a PhD student at Stanford, gave the keynote talk: “When negative concord fails: Focus, alternatives, and the semantics of double negation.”
During May 9-10, PhD candidate Nikolas Webster visited the Department of Linguistics at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, to attend their Workshop on Nominals and Nominalization in Korean and Beyond. Niko gave an invited talk titled The internal arguments of Korean process nominals and complex predicates.
Niko giving his talk at UIUC
Niko also recently received two Presidential and Chancellor’s Dissertation Quarter Fellowship Awards from the UCSC Graduate Division, which will provide support for Fall 2025 and Winter 2026 to complete his dissertation. Congratulations, Niko!
On May 10, 2025, UCSC Linguistics hosted BayPhon, a meeting that brought together about 35 faculty and students in the broader Bay area (San José State, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz) to present their work on phonetics and phonology.
Those in attendance enjoyed a day of abundant sun, with exceptional views across Monterey Bay during lunch, and basked in the light of 11 inspiring presentations and warm conversations. Many thanks to the students and faculty who organized the event, especially the primary organizers: PhD students Hanyoung Byun, Richard Wang, and Professor Rachel Walker.
UCSC researchers were among those presenting at the workshop:
Thanks to Jungu Kang for taking photos throughout the workshop. Some highlights are below:
Nido de Lenguas continued its annual tradition of tabling at Senderos’ Vive Oaxaca Guelaguetza to raise public awareness about the Indigenous languages of Oaxaca. In addition to PhD students Max Kaplan, Matthew Kogan, and Maya Wax Cavallaro and undergraduate students Alexa Ballesteros and Jackie Torres (BA, Linguistics), this year’s team included students from the Estudiantes Oaxaqueños de Ahora, an interest group which aims to build a supportive community for Oaxacan students on campus. Its volunteers reported having a phenomenal time talking to guests about the languages and dialects they speak!
The 43rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 43) took place a couple weekends ago at the University of Washington (April 25-27), with several Santa Crucians in attendance.
PhD student Aidan Katson gave a talk on Korean honorification as a window to understanding animacy,” while PhD student Niko Webster presented a poster on “The syntactic and semantic introduction of internal arguments.” Professor Mia Gong gave a talk on “Specification of D Derives Variation in Relative Clauses” (with Eszter Ótott-Kovács) and presented a poster, “Scrambling through the Looking Glass: Two Types of Movement across Weak Islands.” Professor Maziar Toosarvandani was also in attendance as an audience member.
The Santa Cruz students and faculty got a chance to catch up with some past members of the department. Professor Ruth Kramer (PhD, 2009; Georgetown) gave a talk on “Passivization, speech act participants, and third-person probes in Jarawara” (with Luke Adamson). Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv), a recent visitor in the Department, co-presented a talk, “The bilingual lexicon under Distributed Morphology: An investigation of gender agreement in code-switching.” Professor Andrew Hedding (PhD, 2022), now an Assistant Professor at UW, was on hand as one of the conference’s organizers.
