Category: Student News

Santa Cruz linguists at WCCFL

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.

Santa Cruz linguists at the poster session
Santa Cruz linguists at the conference dinner
Niko Webster presenting his poster
Mia Gong in front of her poster
Andrew Hedding helping put up Mia’s poster
Aidan Katson giving their talk

Banana Slugs moving on

As the academic year comes to a close, we’re proud to celebrate our graduating students and recent alumni as they embark on their next steps in linguistics and beyond. This year, Banana Slugs are headed to a variety of excellent graduate programs, fellowships, and professional opportunities. Whether continuing to pursue research in linguistics or exploring new paths and territories, our students carry with them the skill and curiosity honed at UCSC to their next chapters. Congratulations to all — we can’t wait to see where your journeys take you!

Katie Arnold, MA program at University of British Columbia

This fall, I will be joining the UBC Department of Linguistics as a MA student! I’ll be working with Dr. Anne-Michelle Tessier in her Child Phonology Lab. I’m looking forward to this opportunity to continue developing my research skills and learning about linguistics.

Katie Arnold

Jackson Confer, Baggett Fellowship and PhD Program at the University of Maryland 

After taking a break from my studies for a year, I decided to apply for the Baggett Fellowship at University of Maryland. After spending some time here, I completely fell in love with the department; when it came time to apply to grad schools this cycle, I already knew that I wanted to stay. I really appreciate the explicit marriage between formal and experimental approaches here and the extensive cross-talk that comes with that. In the fellowship, I’ve mostly been doing formal work on the syntax of exceptives and coordination, but I plan to add an experimental dimension to this work as I transition into the PhD program.

Jackson Confer

Andrew Kato, PhD Program at UCLA

With a strong history of research in formal semantics and the syntax-semantics interface, I’ll be heading to UCLA as a PhD student starting Fall ’25. The department’s large size even beyond its s-side faculty also makes for a good opportunity to explore lingering interests of mine in other subfields, mainly computational linguistics and philosophy of language.

Andrew Kato

Sadie Lewis, Baggett Fellowship at the University of Maryland, PhD program at University of Chicago

During my Baggett Fellowship I worked with Masha Polinsky mainly doing fieldwork on Kaqchikel (Mayan). I started working on negation in that language which was my main project. I stayed another semester on her grant “Variations in Exceptive Structures” and completed a project on Thai. Now I am working with Hedde Zeijlstra to work more on negation in Mayan. I will spend the summer in Göttingen and do some work on his ERC grant “Unpacking Paradigmatic Gaps”. Additionally, I have accepted a place at University of Chicago for a PhD in linguistics. I will start this Fall. I am hoping to work with Karlos (Arregi) and Erik (Zyman) and continue working on Kaqchikel.

Sadie Lewis

Akira Santerre, Certification of Pre-SLP at CSU San Marcos

Since I’m switching majors from Linguistics to Speech Language Pathology for my Master’s, I enrolled in a Certification of Pre-SLP at CSU San Marcos. It’s like a post-bacc. It’s nice because I can save money by completing all my prerequisite courses online. After I complete this, in a year, I’ll be all set to apply to a regular SLP master’s program. I’m hoping to get into CSU Long Beach. In the meantime, I’m planning to log some observation hours this summer!

Akira Santerre

Akira Santerre

Ivy Shaw, PhD in Romance Languages & Literatures at UC Berkeley 

I’m incredibly excited to be starting as a PhD student in the Romance Languages and Literatures program at UC Berkeley this fall! The program allows for a comparative study of the linguistics of three Romance Languages, while also developing an in-depth knowledge of a primary language, mine being French. The program is interdisciplinary in nature, and I was drawn to the flexibility of designing a unique and personalized course load with a diversity of linguistic topics and approaches suited to exactly what I want to study. I look forward to expanding on the research I did as an undergrad at UCSC in Old French syntax and also in L2 phonology. The faculty and resources offered at Berkeley are incredible and I couldn’t be happier to be continuing my study of linguistics there. 

Ivy Shaw

Successful 2025 Graduate Research Symposium

Our annual graduate student research and professionalization seminar, LING 290, culminated this year in a Spring Research Symposium held on Friday, April 11, in Humanities 2. The symposium showcased a wide range of ongoing research across subfields. The list of presenters included:

Session 1
– Yağmur Kiper, The semantics of the imperfectives in Turkish
– Emily Knick, Future reference and covert modality in Khalkha Mongolian
– Aidan Katson, Expanding the nominal in English ACC- and POSS-ing nominalizations

Session 2
– Ian Carpick, Deriving vowel reduction from a law governing human motion
– Larry Lyu, The local meets the non-local: assimilation-induced transparency in vowel harmony
– Hanyoung Byun, Interaction between consonant voicing and vowel devoicing in Seoul Korean

Session 3
– Ruoqing Yao, What gets to race? Distinguishedness effect on the ambiguity advantage effect
– Richard Wang, Investigating the role of duration in the categorization of Mandarin tone

Congratulations to all the participants in LING 290 for the excellent progress they’ve made on their research! A big thanks to Professor Rachel Walker, the instructor of the seminar, and all faculty members who have sat in the seminar to give valuable feedback on the presentations! (photo credit: Jungu Kang)

  • PhD student Yağmur Kiper
  • PhD student Ian Carpick
  • PhD student Ruoqing Yao
  • PhD student Aidan Katson
  • PhD student Larry Lyu
  • PhD student Richard Wang
  • PhD student Hanyoung Byun
  • Professor Rachel Walker

2025 Undergraduate Honors in Linguistics

This year, two graduating seniors in the Linguistics major were awarded honors in recognition of their outstanding academic achievement:

  • Grace Nighswonger
  • Irene Wong

Congratulations to Grace and Irene on this recognition of their excellent work and accomplishments! 

 

Banana Slugs at GLOW, PLC, and TEAL

Over spring break, linguistics students and faculty were busy presenting posters and talks across the globe:

  • Professor Mia Gong and PhD student Niko Webster attended the 14th Workshop on Theoretical East Asian Linguistics (TEAL), hosted by USC on March 18-20. Mia gave an invited talk, “Two types of long distance scrambling in Khalkha Mongolian,” while Niko gave a talk entitled “Internal argument introduction in Korean complex predicates.”
  • Several UC Santa Cruz linguists attended the main colloquium of the 47th Annual Meeting of Generative Linguistics in the Old World) in Frankfurt am Main at Goethe University on March 25-27. Niko Webster and Professor Ivy Sichel gave a long talk entitled “Information structure alone cannot account for subject islandhood: An experimental study,” where they presented on collaborative work with Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv University), Matthew Kogan, and Matt Wagers. PhD Student Yaqing Cao gave a lightning talk and poster presentation on “Scope reconstruction in head movements as featural valuations.” While there, they reconnected with Anissa Zaitsu (BA 2017, MA 2018, currently a PhD student at Stanford).
  • Yaqing Cao gave a talk at the 49th Penn Linguistics Conference (PLC), entitled “Ability modal, negation, causation: How to derive the (anti)-actuality entailments?” on April 5-6.

Two articles by Brodkin appear in print

Two journal articles by sixth-year PhD student Dan Brodkin have appeared by “early access” in print. One, “The prosody of the extended VP”, is forthcoming in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and investigates the syntax-prosody interface in Mandar:

This paper investigates the syntax of VSO and VOS clauses in Mandar (Austronesian) by leveraging the prosody. This language allows free alternations between VSO and VOS orders, but phonotactic diagnostics reveal that VSO strings are optimally parsed into tight prosodic constituents while VOS strings are not. These results converge with syntactic diagnostics to show that VSO orders arise from leftward movement of the verb while VOS orders are generated through an additional step of rightward scrambling of the S. Targeted manipulations then reveal that phonological phrases can be built around substrings of arguments in the VSO string, providing a new type of evidence for fine functional structure in the extended VP (Larson 1988). The prosodic parse of scrambled arguments, finally, shows that scrambling places its targets in adjunct positions (Chomsky 1993) in Mandar, setting up an account of scrambling that is grounded in the principle of Greed (Lasnik 1995).

Another, “Suppletion in global perspective”, will appear in Linguistic Inquiry and analyzes a system of suppletion in Mandar (download the pdf):

This article documents and analyzes a system of suppletive alternations that are conditioned by top-down prosodic context. In Mandar (Austronesian), seven heads supplete at the right edge of the phonological phrase to satisfy an output constraint on foot structure. When phrase-external phonological context makes it possible to resolve this output constraint in a more optimal way, these patterns of suppletion are suspended. These effects suggest that the mechanism that regulates suppletion, Vocabulary Insertion, must be situated within a phonological calculus that can access global context and respond to output constraints.

Congratulations, Dan!

Banana Slugs at HSP

UC Santa Cruz was well represented at the 38th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, held March 27-29 at the University of Maryland. A number of undergraduates and graduates were there to present their research, including Matthew Kogan, Joshua Lieberstein, Subhekshya Shrestha, and Ruoqing Yao. They were joined by current faculty members Dustin Chacón, Amanda Rysling, and Matt Wagers.

They ran into many grad alumni, including Jack Duff (PhD, 2023) and Duygu Demiray (MA, 2024), undergrad alumni/current Baggett Fellows Jackson Confer (BA, 2022) and Sadie Lewis (BA, 2023), as well as former LRC visitor Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv University). Two other slugs, 2011 BA alum Caroline Andrews (Zurich) and 2013 MA alum Adam Morgan (NYU Langone), anchored a well-attended and engaging plenary session featuring field psycholinguistics on the last day. They presented their research on case and sentence planning in Shipibo (Andrews) and the comprehension and production of switch reference in Nungon (Morgan). Despite the riveting science, it seems everyone found an opportunity to slip out in the warm weather to see the cherry blossoms or at least to rub Testudo for good luck.

Presentations by current members of the department: 

and those by our alumni:

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