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Joshua Lieberstein — first-year MA student, second-year BA/MA student, long-time linguist — was in Guatemala over the summer to continue his investigation of K’iche’. He was awarded a FLAS Fellowship (through Vanderbilt) to attend the Mayan Language Institute (through Tulane University) for six weeks. Classes were taught by native speaker teachers and linguists and Joshua lived with two different families while enrolled in the program. He then went to Chichicastenango on his own for three weeks where the dialect of K’iche’ he focuses on is spoken. While there he conducted fieldwork and strengthened his connections for future trips, all while learning more K’iche’!

Lieberstein and collaborator Mildred Aledíz Clarivel Mejía

On Friday, September 26, our department gathered in Humanities 1 to mark the start of the new academic year with the annual fall welcome event. The UCSC linguistics community came together to catch up after the summer and to welcome this year’s incoming cohort. We are delighted to welcome Keyü Dong, Dahoon Kim, and Florence Lyu as first-year PhD students, and Ulysses Noë as an incoming BAMA student. In addition, we are joined this year by Mirea Sasaki, an exchange student from the University of Tokyo.

The afternoon was filled with vibrant conversations about current projects and future plans. Throughout the quarter, we’ll continue sharing highlights from faculty and students about their research and what lies ahead for the year. Stay tuned! 

Professor Emeritus Jim McCloskey recently participated in a podcast about the Irish Language Renaissance, which is also featured on the LSA website. Here is a summary of the podcast:

Irish is among Europe’s oldest languages. It’s a near miracle that anyone speaks it today. Patrick talks with online Irish teacher Mollie Guidera whose students include a Kentucky farmer who speaks Irish to his horses; also with Irish scholar Jim McCloskey who developed a love of the language when he spent a summer living with Irish speakers. Irish is changing fast, with far more of its speakers learning it as a second language, while the native-speaker population declines.

It was announced on April 28 that Distinguished Professor Emerita Sandra Chung has been elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. One of the oldest learned societies in the United States, election to membership is a signal honor. Congratulations, Sandy!

You can read the full announcement here. You can find a list of the newest members here: https://www.amacad.org/new-members-2022, where you’ll note that Sandy immediately alphabetically precedes incoming classmates Sandra Cisneros and Glenn Close.

After emerging from an obligatory two-week home quarantine in Tokyo, Junko and Armin were involved (mostly virtually…) in linguistic activities at the Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) with their collaborator Haruo Kubozono  (who was a one-year Fulbright scholar in our department in 1994-95). In the process, they presented at the Prosody and Grammar Festa (Jan 29-30, 2022) “Postnasal Voicing and the stratified lexicon of Japanese” (https://www2.ninjal.ac.jp/past-events/2009_2021/event/specialists/project-meeting/m-2021/20220129/), taking up former work of their own and recent contributions by Jennifer Smith (UNC, Visiting Assistant Professor at UCSC in 2000-01). At the Graduate School of Humanities of Kobe University, they gave a keynote lecture entitled  “An OT typological perspective on Japanese lexical and postlexical accent”. The event, called “The Kobe-NINJAL Linguistics Colloquium: Frontiers of Japanese Language Research”, http://www.lit.kobe-u.ac.jp//event/2022-02-24-01.html) took place (actually in person!) on March 10, 2022 and celebrated Professor Kubozono’s retirement. There, they also met up with Maho Morimoto (UCSC Linguistics PhD 2020), who just got a three-year postdoc position at Sophia University.

Besides these activities, they were involved in two editorial projects. The first is with Haruo Kubozono, Oxford University Press, Prosody and Prosodic Interfaces, publication date: 05/12/2022. It contains contributions by Ryan Bennett (UCSC PhD 2012), Robert Henderson (UCSC PhD 2012), and Megan Harvey, on lexical pitch in Uspanteko as well as our joint paper with Jennifer Bellik (UCSC PhD 2019) and Nick Kalivoda (UCSC PhD. 2018) on matching and alignment. Junko (who is a fan of penguins) is very happy with the front cover of the volume!

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/prosody-and-prosodic-interfaces-9780198869740?lang=en&cc=gb The second editorial project, Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory Theory and Analyses, eds.  J.  Bellik, J.  Ito, N. Kalivoda and A.  Mester, will appear with Equinox (https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/syntax-prosody/), publication date:  01/03/2023. Besides the editors, other contributors are Santa Cruzians involved in the SPOT NSF project: Richard Bibbs, Dan Brodkin, Yaqing Cao, Benjamin Eischens, Edward Shingler, Max Tarlov, and Nicholas Van Handel.

Oh yes, in between all of this, they went to a Kabuki performance, a sumo tournament, and warmed up in hot spring onsens in Tohoku and Hakone.