Category: Student News

Spring & Summer 2023 departmental honors

Several seniors graduated with honors in Spring or Summer 2023 in the Linguistics major:

(Spring 2023)

  • Sebastian Bissiri
  • Nicole Britton
  • Claire Cruse
  • Nicholas Hanson
  • Shaya Karasso
  • Kevin Kersey
  • Jane Kintz
  • Kasey La
  • Sarah Lee
  • Michael Lynch
  • Ivy Masoner
  • Ezra Williams

as well as in the Language Studies major:

(Spring 2023)

  • Jennifer Cheng
  • Nishant Suria
  • Madison Tirado

(Summer 2023)

  • Stephen Migdal
  • Delaney Stewart

Congratulations to all of you on your academic achievements!

Slugs at CreteLing 2023

CreteLing celebrated its fifth anniversary this summer, which took place from July 15 to July 28 in Rethymnon, Greece. 

Professor Ivy Sichel co-taught a class with Karlos Arregui (Professor, University of Chicago) titled “Socio-grammar”, which focused on gender asymmetries and markedness in language and the actual world. And Professor Sichel described her experience at CreteLing as “a perfect balance between intense learning and a laid-back communal atmosphere”.

Professor Roumyana Pancheva co-taught a class on “Comparative Syntax and Semantics of Slavic” with Barbara Citko (Professor, University of Washington) and Sergei Tatevosov (Professor, Moscow State University).

Professor Emerita Donka Farkas co-taught “The Semantics of Mood” with Paul Portner (Professor, Georgetown University).

B.A. alumnus Eric Baković (Professor and Chair at UC San Diego) co-taught “Computation, Learning and Phonological Theory” with Adam Albright (Professor, MIT).

Ph.D. students Yağmur Kiper and Elifnur Ulusoy, M.A. students Duygu Demiray and Larry Lyu, and recent B.A. alumnus Jackson Confer were also in attendance.

  • Professor Ivy Sichel

(Photo credits: CreteLing Summer School Facebook)

Slugs’ summer research travels

Faculty Ryan Bennett spent 3 weeks doing fieldwork with speakers of A’ingae in Ecuador, with Scott AnderBois (UCSC Ph.D. 2011, now Associate Professor at Brown University). This included a week-long language documentation and conservation workshop, and experimental phonetic research on nasality in A’ingae.

Retired faculty Donka Farkas gave an invited talk “Rhetorical questions revisited” at the workshop The Semantics of Non-canonical Questions at the University of Toronto.

Fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Vishal Arvindam spent 10 days at the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad as a visiting scholar conducting a visual world eye-tracking study on the processing of reflexives in Telugu. He made various academic connections within the local linguistic circle and indulged in Biryani. 

Fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Maya Wax Cavallaro traveled to Santiago Laxopa (Oaxaca, Mexico) this summer to do fieldwork on right-edge phenomena, including conversations, short narratives, and a couple of tongue twisters. She also collected data for her syntax research on control as part of a project collaborated with Jason Ostrove (Ph.D., 2018, now Faculty Affairs assistant at Harvard). She participated in various local activities, including but not limited to joining the community’s fiesta and playing piccolo in a band.

  • Recording nasal airflow data from speakers of A'ingae
    Recording nasal airflow data from speakers of A'ingae

Banana slugs at the Summer Institute

Linguists from UC Santa Cruz are well represented at the 2023 Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute, which is taking place June 19-July 14 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Rising second year PhD student Richard Wang is in attendance, after receiving a highly selective Linguistic Institute Fellowship.

Professor Matt Wagers is co-teaching a course on Field Psycholinguistics, with PhD alumnus Jed Pizarro Guevara (PhD 2020), who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at UMass.

Other banana slugs in attendance include Professor Eric Bakovic (BA, 1993), who is teaching a course on What Exactly is Phonological Opacity, Professor Kyle Rawlins (PhD, 2008), who is teaching a course on Advanced Pragmatics, and Professor Aaron White (BA, 2009), who is teaching a course on Representation Learning for Syntactic and Semantic Theory.

Numerous defenses defended successfully

This Spring quarter has been particularly active with defenses, with numerous graduate students successfully defending their MA thesis or qualifying paper:

MA Theses

  • Delaney Gomez-Jackson: “Question and indefinites in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec” (Jess Law, Roumi Pancheva, and Maziar Toosarvandani, chair)
  • Matthew Kogan: “Maintaining syntactic positions and thematic roles in memory” (Grant McGuire, Ivy Sichel, and Matt Wagers, chair)
  • Elif Ulusoy: “Connectivity and case effects in agreement attraction: The case of Turkish” (Jorge Hankamer, Amanda Rysling, and Matt Wagers, chair)

Qualifying Papers

  • Jonathan Paramore: “Codas are universally moraic” (Ryan Bennett, Jaye Padgett, and Rachel Walker, chair)
  • Eli Sharf: “Identificational appositives” (Jess Law, Ivy Sichel, and Maziar Toosarvandani, chair)
  • Jun Tamura: “Compounding words in the syntax can produce phrasal phonology: Evidence from Aoyagi morphemes (Ryan Bennett, chair, Mia Gong, and Rachel Walker)
  • Maya Wax Cavallaro: “The syllable in domain generalization: Evidence from artificial language learning” (Ryan Bennett, Grant McGuire, Jaye Padgett, chair)

In addition, several students advanced to candidacy, successfully completing their qualifying exam:

  • Lalitha Balachandran: “Linguistic memory domains in off-line sentence memory and on-line language comprehension” (Amanda Rysling, Maziar Toosarvandani, Matt Wagers, chair, and Ming Xiang (University of Chicago))
  • Myke Brinkerhoff: “Acoustic discriminability of phonation in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec” (Ryan Bennet, Marc Garallek (UC San Diego), Grant McGuire, Jaye Padgett, chair)
  • Dan Brodkin: “Locality and extraction in Mandar” (Ryan Bennett, Sandy Chung, chair, McCloskey, Ileana Paul (University of Western Ontario))
  • Yaqing Cao: “Is there head movement in negation and modals?” (Bryan Donaldson (Languages and Applied Linguistics), Jess Law, Ivy Sichel, chair, Maziar Toosarvandani)
  • Max Kaplan: “Phonotactic repair of onset clusters: Confusability and expectations” (Mark Amengual (Languages and Applied Linguistics), Ryan Bennett, chair, Grant McGuire, Amanda Rysling)

Congratulations to all the students who completed a milestone!

Another successful LURC

LURC Presenters, standing in front of log in Stevenson CourtyardOn June 2, students and faculty in the department gathered for the Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC). This annual conference celebrates the groundbreaking research of Language Studies and Linguistics majors and is always a highlight of the department’s academic year calendar. 

This year’s LURC was no exception, featuring nine posters on a range of topics in phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics, syntax, and semantics:

  • Cal Boye-Lynn, Killian Kiuttu, and Mackenzi Rauls: Everyone loves complements: Complementizer-determiner ambiguity and acceptability
  • Tony Butorovich, Claire Wellwood, and Max Xie: Production of English /r/ by prosodic position
  • Sophie Green, Shaya Karasso, and Josh Lieberstein: Ambiguity Advantage Effect in Wh-questions
  • Nicholas Hanson: Conveyances of sarcasm in written language
  • Colin Hirschberg: Affectedness in passives
  • Sadira Lewis: Events and ambiguity in -er nominals: An experimental approach
  • Stephen Migdal: “At least,” QUD, and Pragmatic Enrichment of NNPs
  • Wilson Wenhao Sun: OT account for consonant clusters in Cantonese loanword phonology
  • Nishant Suria: A phonetic investigation of the retroflex approximant in Tamil

After brief presentations and a discussion period, the Distinguished Alumna Speaker Caroline Andrews (BA, Linguistics, 2011) spoke on “Optionality and commitment: Sentence planning in an ergative language.” Dr. Andrews received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2019, and she is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich.

Bennett at HISPhonCog

Last week, Professor Ryan Bennett presented a talk at HISPhonCog in Seoul, entitled “Syllable position in secondary dorsal contrasts: an ultrasound study of Irish.” While there, he had the opportunity to catch up with some past and future students in the department. Maho Morimoto (PhD, 2020) also presented at the conference, and incoming PhD student Hanyoung Byun was in attendance as well.

HisPhonCog

Maho Morimoto, Hanyoung Byun, Ryan Bennett (from left to right)

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