Category: Uncategorized

Hats off to Hofmann!

Lisa Hofmann defended her dissertation on Thursday, January 20th. Her dissertation is titled “Anaphora and Negation” and her committee consisted of Adrian Brasoveanu (chair), Jess Law, and Amanda Rysling.
Congratulations, Lisa!

WHASC’s White House Correspondent

We recently received an update from recent grad Karen Lowe, who was a double major in Linguistics and History. Karen spenther final quarter on the UCDC program in Washington, D.C., before graduating in December.

There she completed an internship with the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). She writes, “It’s amazing being able to work at the Federal level and see how the “sausage” gets made with environmental policy.”

In the new year, Karen plans to complete another internship, at the Georgetown Law Center.

Whasc Profile: Rachel Walker

1) Coming to Santa Cruz represents a return for you, as well. How have things changed since you were last here?

In the department, the biggest change has been the people. There are many faculty who arrived since I was a student here, and the staff have changed, and, of course, the students. It’s a great opportunity to get to know new people and learn about new threads of research. There also seems to be a lot of new wildlife on campus: a lot more deer and coyotes than I remember, and way more turkeys.

2) In light of the times, how has it been to adjust to life back in the department?

It’s been an adventure! Things have of course been limited by the pandemic, but it was terrific to be able to teach in person in the fall and to resume again just recently this quarter. Teaching in person has helped me to get to know a lot of the students in the department, both the graduates and the undergraduates. I’m delighted about the reopening of the Stevenson Coffee Shop, because it’s a great meeting place nestled among the redwoods and I really missed it when it was closed.

 

3) What’s on the horizon for the coming year – be it plans for research, for travel, or anything else?

On the research front, I’m working on analyzing acoustic data we collected for Ladin, a minority Romance language spoken in the Italian Alps. This research will help us to understand properties of the syllable structure of Ladin and pave the way for our future investigation of stress in the language. I’m also planning to continue investigating the temporal structure of liquids in syllable rhymes in different languages. On the recreational side, I’ve got lots of hikes and exploring around the area in mind when I get some free time!

Reading Group Updates

The term’s reading group schedule looks something like this.

S/lab, the premier reading group on all things psycholinguistic, will be meeting on Mondays from 4-5 PM PST at this zoom link. Come for discussions this term on QPs and QEs.

LarynxTime III, on the Larynx, will be meeting on Tuesdays from 1-2 PM at this zoom link. Come for discussion of Esling et al.’s 2019 book, “Voice Quality: The Laryngeal Articulator Model,” and more.

WLMA will be meeting at this zoom link on Fridays at 9 AM, and it features a solid lineup of presentations on this term- on Q’anjob’al, Santiago Laxopa Zapotec, and Mandar.

MRG, now pronounced /mɝd͡ʒ/ by the youth, will be meeting on Fridays at 3 PM at this zoom link. The readings this term will focus on the interaction between (apparent) localism in morphology- in particular, as envisioned by much work on DM- and globalism in phonology.

PhLunch, still happening around lunchtime, will be meeting on Fridays at 12 PM at this zoom link for quite a few things: abstract workshops, QP and QE presentations, and discussion of several papers on prosody, phonetics, and perception.

There are several reading groups that will be on a temporary hiatus this term – including S-Circle, Nang, and Laloco- but stay tuned for updates on those down the line.

1 2 3 4 5 … 186