Category: Student News

In the course of the week, the University of Minnesota Press published Deaf Gain, a volume of essays which argue from various perspectives against the deficit view of deafness and which instead frame deafness as a distinct way of being, one which brings intellectual and cultural benefits. Among the contributors to the volume is grad student Clara Sherley-Appel, who coauthored one of the chapters in the book along with John Bonvillian of the University of Virginia. The title of their paper is Manual Signs and Gestures of the Inuit of Baffin Island: Observations during the Three Voyages Led by Martin Frobisher and Clara has this to say about the paper:

The chapter is part of a project I worked on with John Bonvillian at UVA on the use of manual signs and gestures in first contact situations. The primary case study in this chapter concerns the journeys of a privateer of the Elizabethan era named Martin Frobisher. Frobisher was commissioned by Elizabeth to seek a Northwest Passage to what was then known as Cathay. He didn’t find a Northwest Passage (because it doesn’t exist), but the logs and diaries of the crew from the three voyages he led mention using signs and gestures to facilitate contact and trade, and there is some additional evidence that the Inuit of Baffin Island had elaborated sign systems used for hunting and other purposes, making it an interesting case study.

We welcome nine new graduate students to the department this year.

Ben Mericli comes to UCSC Linguistics from Washington, D.C., where lived and worked for five years after college. Ben studied linguistics, philosophy, and engineering physics at the University of Pittsburgh. He plans to concentrate on morphology and syntax at UCSC and, although his D.C.-based band has been disbanded, hopes to continue to write and play music as linguistics permits.

Chelsea Miller is entering her first year as an MA student but has been on the campus for 4 years having completed her BA in Linguistics here at UCSC in 2014; she looks forward to continuing to study linguistics here. With regard to linguistic research, her interests include syntax and psycholinguistics, and more specifically within these areas, ellipsis, ellipsis resolution, parsing, and memory. In her “free time”, she is probably still thinking about linguistics, but also enjoys taking dance classes, cooking, walking, hiking, and biking (though it’s a must stop to pet all cats on the way).

Hitomi Hirayama comes from Japan, and completed her BA and MA at the University of Tokyo. She is interested in the semantics of noun phrases, information structure, and also in the Romance languages. She is seriously missing udon noodles in Japan, but is nevertheless enjoying her new life in California with two cute cats.

Jed Guevara got his BA in Linguistics and French from UC Berkeley back in 2010. He then went to CSU Long Beach to get his MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. He did a brief stint as an ESL teacher in Long Beach but decided to go back to school. He plans to focus on the acquisition and processing of syntactic dependencies in Tagalog and other Philippine languages. When he is not doing linguistics, he enjoys cooking with wine (and adding some to the food as well), and/or playing boardgames.

Jeff Adler is from New Jersey. He did his undergrad degree at Rutgers, and then lived in Colombia for a year. Intellectually, he swings p-side, and is interested mostly in everything phonological theory (especially OT), with additional interests in phonetics and syntax. Outside of linguistics, he likes hiking and other endeavors into nature, as well as reading and buying new clothes.

Margaret Kroll found linguistics relatively late, after a (short) career working in politics. She was for the past two years in the linguistics PhD program at UCLA, but is very happy to have moved to Santa Cruz. Her linguistic interests are in pragmatics, semantics, and philosophy of language, in particular issues at the semantics/pragmatics interface. Her non-linguistic interests include running, politics, and, at the moment, teaching herself to sew.

Maxwell Sowell is originally from San Diego, and received his BA in Linguistics and Philosophy at UC Davis. He enjoys working with semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. In his free time he likes to drum (let’s jam or start a band!) and drag his friends out to be social. Long road trips are rad.

Nate Clair is a Utah native, whose two loves in life are languages and the outdoors. Nate did his undergrad work at the University of Utah where he studied Linguistics and Middle East studies. He loves Indo-Iranian languages in particular and focuses his research on their syntax and semantics. When not employed in linguistic matters, he is an avid runner, hiker and cross-country skier.

Steven Foley comes to Santa Cruz by way of New York City, so he’s thrilled to experience genuine nature but misses good bagels. Morphosyntax, ergativity, and Caucasian languages are major interests of his, as are cooking and at least moderately artsy movies.

Also (re-)joining the department this year is Bern Samko who has spent the last twelve months on a research fellowship at the University of Potsdam in Germany. Bern sent in this report of her year:

I’ve just returned to Santa Cruz from the University of Potsdam, where I spent a year as a visiting PhD student in the Integrated Graduate School associated with the Collaborative Research Center Information Structure: The Linguistic Means of Structuring Utterances, Sentences and Texts. The project group I worked with, The Syntactic Expression of Information Structure and the Architecture of Grammar, was led by Gisbert Fanselow and former LRC Research Associate Luis Vicente. Two internal workshops and a PhD day gave me the opportunity to meet, interact with, and get feedback from students and faculty working on information structure at the University of Potsdam, the Humboldt University of Berlin, and the Free University of Berlin. I had a great time living in Berlin, learned a lot, and am looking forward to making the most of that knowledge this year in Santa Cruz!

We are also fortunate enough to host two visiting graduate students this year.

Annemarie van Dooren is a visiting scholar from Utrecht, the Netherlands, where she completed her MA thesis on the syntax of modal verbs.  Here in Santa Cruz, she will be working on the semantics of the same topic.