Category: Student News

Linguistics and Computer Science major Carolynn Jimenez will be at this week’s SACNAS National Conference, in Seattle, to present joint work (with Megan Vassey, Jennifer Sawyer – a graduate of our program – and Lyn Walker). Their poster is titled “Improved Dynamic Natural Language Generation with Personage Using Language Manager”. You can view the abstract here.

MA student Tommy Denby continues to publish to the New Yorker blogs, with these musings on the most recent season of the New York Mets and on being a Mets fan

This year’s Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) was an inspiring look at the excellent work accomplished by some of our majors (and a recent alum). Congratulations to Donez Horton-Bailey, Kelsey Kraus, Maura O’Leary, Nastassja Myer, and Nataliya Munishkina for their excellent presentations. And congrats and many thanks to recent alum Gabrielle Halberg, who presented on her current work as a Ph.D. student in Computer Science.

Ryan Bennett will defend his dissertation, “Foot conditioned phonotactics and prosodic constituency”, this Wednesday, June 13th, at 10:00 am, in the Humanities 1 Building, Room 210. All are welcome to attend.

Many congratulations to the following graduate students for the milestones they have recently passed!

Oliver Northrup successfully defended his second Qualifying Paper, “Working backward: Back-transliteration as a diagnostic for loanword adaptation processes”, on May 16th, 2012. His QP committee consisted of Junko (chair), Wendell, and Grant.

Setting a departmental record for QP-to-QE turnaround, Oliver then passed his Qualifying Examination on May 31st, with a work titled “Bias as uncertain authority”. His QE committee was Donka Farkas (Chair), Pranav, Adrian, and Marilyn Walker (Professor, Computer Science, UCSC).

Bern Samko successfully defended her second Qualifying Paper, “Participle preposing”, on May 23rd, 2012. Her QP committee was Jim (chair), Pranav, and Amy Rose.

Kendra Buchanan successfully defended her first Qualifying Paper, “Perspectives on Quantity-Sensitivity and Decomposed Scalar Constraints: A View from Hindi Stress”, on June 8th, 2012. Her QP committee was Junko (chair), Wendell, and Armin.

Fifth year student Robert Henderson has just accepted a two year postdoc at McGill University. He will be working with Lisa Travis and Jessica Coon on a SSHRC grant called “The mental representation of language variation: macro- and micro-parameters.” Congrats Robert!

Congratulations to Peter Fabian, who was just awarded a Summer Research Fellowship by the Institute for Humanities Research. The award is for field work in Peru on the Cuzco dialect of Quechua. Congratulations, Peter!