Category: Student News

LINGUISTICS UNDERGRADUATES WIN HUGRAS!

The Institute for Humanities Research has announced the recipients of the Humanities Undergraduate Research Awards (HUGRAs) for academic year 2011-2012. Out of 10 recipients, three were from our department! Congratulations to Shawna Mattison, Matilda Morrison, Nataliya Munishkina, and to their advisors!

Shawna Mattison, Linguistics
“New Methodologies in Psycholinguistics Research”
Mentor: Matthew Wagers, Assistant Professor of Linguistics

Matilda Morrison, Linguistics
“A Dummy in German”
Mentor: Jorge Hankamer, Professor of Linguistics

Nataliya Munishkina, Linguistics
“Interaction Across Grammatical Categories: Verbs and Prepositions”
Mentor: Donka Farkas, Professor of Linguistics

KATHERINE BRUCE ACCEPTS POSITION AT FLUENTIAL

Katherine Bruce, a third year undergraduate in the department, accepted a computational linguist position at Fluential, a silicon valley language tech company working on spoken dialogue systems and speech to speech translation. Katherine tells us she is ecstatic about the opportunity to use her training in a cutting-edge field and is looking forward to working with Beth-Ann Hockey, a former member of UCSC’s faculty!

Linguistics At Santa Cruz Conference

On Saturday, the linguistics department hosted its annual graduate student research conference, LASC. The second- and third-year graduate students (and a visitor!) presenting work were Nate Arnett, Kendra Buchanan, Nick Deschenes, Yasuhiro Iida, Katia Kravtchenko, Oliver Northrup, Bern Samko, and Allan Schwade. These presentations spanned the subfields of linguistics and dealt with aspects of a variety of languages, including English, Hindi, Japanese, Maltese, Russian, and Turkish. (Find the program here, and some photos below.) Chris Barker gave the Distinguished Alumnus Lecture, “How to Sprout”, which engaged with the long tradition of UCSC work on sluicing and sprouting. After the conference, the discussion continued over dinner at a party at the home of Pranav Anand (who deserves thanks and congratulations for organizing Saturday’s events).

As usual, LASC coincided with the department’s Open House weekend for visiting prospective PhD students. A total of seven admitted students were here this week (five of them on Friday and Saturday), attending classes and reading group meetings, meeting with faculty, and being treated to the beauty of campus. Friday’s events culminated in a delicious pizza party hosted by Mark Norris.

Getting started

Bern Samko

Microbe catch

Nate Arnett

Chris Barker

Conference participants

Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) Conference This Saturday

The department’s annual Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference will take place this Saturday, March 10th, 8:15-4:30, in Humanities One, room 202. The program for the conference is available here. Our guest alum speaker this year is Chris Barker of New York University. As in previous years, LASC overlaps with our Prospective Graduate Student Open House. Please welcome any and all visiting prospectives!

Ryan Bennett Returns From Yale

Ryan Bennett recently returned from Yale, where he gave an invited talk entitled “On the prevalence of footing”. The talk focused on formal and experimental evidence for the presence of foot-structure in languages that do not obviously have foot-based stress (based partially on Ryan’s forthcoming dissertation). You can find out more about this work on Ryan’s web page.

Ryan Bennett and Robert Henderson Publish in NLLT

Ryan and Robert’s paper “Accent in Uspanteko” has been accepted for publication at Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. The paper combines formal analysis with language description (based partially on their own fieldwork with Uspanteko, an endangered Mayan language spoken in Guatemala), and began its life as a project for Armin Mester’s pitch accent seminar in Winter 2010.

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