Category: Student News

Successful end-of-the-year defenses

The final week of the quarter brought a flurry of successful defenses across all levels—dissertations, QP2s, and QP1s. Congratulations to all who reached these important milestones!

Dissertations

  • Myke Brinkerhoff, “Voice Quality and Laryngeal Complexity in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec”
  • Yaqing Cao, “Scope Reconstruction in Head Movement”

QP2s

  • Ian Carpick, “Deriving Vowel Reduction from a Law Governing Human Motion”
  • Richard Wang, “Investigating the role of duration in the categorization of Mandarin tone”

QP1s

  • Hanyoung Byun, “Interaction between consonant voicing and vowel devoicing in Seoul Korean”
  • Aidan Katson,“Expanding the nominal in English ACC- and POSS-ing nominalizations”
  • Emily Knick, “Future reference and covert modality in Khalkha Mongolian”
  • Ruoqing Yao, “Who and when gets to race? The distinguishedness effect in pronominal ambiguity resolution”

Spring 2025 Linguistics Honors

Several seniors were awarded honors in Spring 2025 in the Linguistics major:

  • Cal Boye-Lynn
  • Mesa Diehl
  • AJ Kim
  • Yuki Koch
  • Josh Lieberstein
  • Matthew Vasser

In particular, Sam Beatty received Highest Honors in Linguistics.

Congratulations to all!

LURC 2025

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.”

Nikolas Webster Gave Invited Talk, Received Fellowship Awards

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! 

Successful BayPhon 2025

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:

  • Myke Brinkerhoff presented a talk titled “The acoustics landscape of voice quality.”
  • Hanyoung Byun presented a poster titled “Lenis obstruent voicing in Seoul Korean: Phonological or phonetic?”
  • Ian Carpick presented a talk titled “Deriving vowel reduction from a law governing human motion.”

Thanks to Jungu Kang for taking photos throughout the workshop. Some highlights are below:

  • PhD Student Ian Carpick
  • PhD Student Hanyoung Byun
  • PhD Student Myke Brinkerhoff
  • Professor Rachel Walker at the poster session with presenters
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