Another successful LURC

LURC Presenters, standing in front of log in Stevenson CourtyardOn June 2, students and faculty in the department gathered for the Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC). This annual conference celebrates the groundbreaking research of Language Studies and Linguistics majors and is always a highlight of the department’s academic year calendar. 

This year’s LURC was no exception, featuring nine posters on a range of topics in phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics, syntax, and semantics:

  • Cal Boye-Lynn, Killian Kiuttu, and Mackenzi Rauls: Everyone loves complements: Complementizer-determiner ambiguity and acceptability
  • Tony Butorovich, Claire Wellwood, and Max Xie: Production of English /r/ by prosodic position
  • Sophie Green, Shaya Karasso, and Josh Lieberstein: Ambiguity Advantage Effect in Wh-questions
  • Nicholas Hanson: Conveyances of sarcasm in written language
  • Colin Hirschberg: Affectedness in passives
  • Sadira Lewis: Events and ambiguity in -er nominals: An experimental approach
  • Stephen Migdal: “At least,” QUD, and Pragmatic Enrichment of NNPs
  • Wilson Wenhao Sun: OT account for consonant clusters in Cantonese loanword phonology
  • Nishant Suria: A phonetic investigation of the retroflex approximant in Tamil

After brief presentations and a discussion period, the Distinguished Alumna Speaker Caroline Andrews (BA, Linguistics, 2011) spoke on “Optionality and commitment: Sentence planning in an ergative language.” Dr. Andrews received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2019, and she is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich.

Bennett at HISPhonCog

Last week, Professor Ryan Bennett presented a talk at HISPhonCog in Seoul, entitled “Syllable position in secondary dorsal contrasts: an ultrasound study of Irish.” While there, he had the opportunity to catch up with some past and future students in the department. Maho Morimoto (PhD, 2020) also presented at the conference, and incoming PhD student Hanyoung Byun was in attendance as well.

HisPhonCog

Maho Morimoto, Hanyoung Byun, Ryan Bennett (from left to right)

Alyssa Scarsciotti begins Peace Corps service

Alyssa Scarsciotti

Alyssa Scarsciotti

Alumna Alyssa Scarsciotti (BA Linguistics, 2020) is embarking on a tour in Costa Rica for the Peace Corp, as part of the first cohort of volunteers to serve overseas after the pandemic. Her journey from Stevenson College to Latin America was featured in a recent news article. Alyssa credited many professors for transforming her academic journey,  including Linguistics faculty Pranav Anand, Jorge Hankamer, Junko Ito, Ivy Sichel, and Maziar Toosarvandani.

Bibbs receives Hankamer Award

On May 19, Richard Bibbs was honored as this year’s recipient of the Jorge Hankamer Outstanding Graduate Instructor in Linguistics.  From the award citation:

This award, given to one graduate student TA each year, is named after Professor Emeritus Jorge Hankamer, whose dedication to pedagogy within Linguistics and the University at large has been an inspiration to and cornerstone of our department for many years. In recognition of his numerous contributions to teaching, course design, and mentorship of his fellow TAs.

Richard Bibbs

Richard Bibbs, Professor Ryan Bennett (Graduate Program Director), Professor Matt Wagers (Chair) (from left to right)

Humanities Fellowships Awarded to Linguistics Graduate Students

The outstanding research of several graduate students in Linguistics was recently recognized by the Humanities Division.

Fifth-year PhD students Jack Duff and Morwenna Hoeks were each awarded one-quarter Dissertation Completion Fellowships for the 2023-2024 academic year. Jack’s dissertation, “On the timing of pragmatic inferences in comprehension,” profiles how narrative conventions like prototypical cause-and-effect plot structure invite readers to draw inferences that go beyond what is said in a text and explores how the reader’s path to those inferences is mediated by the external pressure facing them as they read. Morwenna’s dissertation, “Alternatives in context: Investigations on the processing of focus,” uses the interpretation of focus—a grammatical device all languages have for highlighting important information—to build psycholinguistic theories of language comprehension and prediction.

In addition, the Humanities Institute (THI) awarded summer research fellowships to fourth-year PhD student Vishal Arvindam and second-year PhD student Jonathan Paramore. Vishal’s award will support travel to India this summer to perform fieldwork for his dissertation, “Processing of anti-local reflexives in Telugu.” Jonathan’s award will support his travel to Pakistan to perform fieldwork for a research project on nasalization in Punjabi and Mankiyali.

WCCFL 41 takes place at UC Santa Cruz

This past weekend (May 5-7) saw over 125 linguists from around the world convene in and around Stevenson College for the 41st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 41). They presented 42 talks and 39 posters, on a wide range of topics in theoretical phonology, syntax, and semantics. Two special sessions brought together specialists on phi-features and deixis and anaphora; one virtual poster session enabled presenters not able to attend in person to participate; three invited speakers gave plenary talks on social gender and nominal structure, locality at the morphology-phonology interface, and demonstrative expressions.

The photo gallery below captures the lively spirit of the conference, which featured a conference dinner and other social events, alongside the talks and posters. For some attendees, the conference ended in a visit to the giant redwoods at Henry Cowell State Park, where a special session on “root structure” was held (video courtesy of fourth year PhD student Dan Brodkin).

In addition to many current faculty and students, alumni Andrew Hedding (PhD, 2022), Aaron Kaplan (PhD, 2008), and Line Mikkelsen (PhD, 2004) were present. Some other past members of the department were also in attendance, but were not captured photographically, including Vera Gribanova (PhD, 2010) and Boris Harizanov (PhD, 2014).

One person appears in only a couple of these photos, because she was behind the camera, fourth-year PhD student Yaqing Cao.

WCCFL 41 was made possible by the generous support of the Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz and the Department of Linguistics, as well as the tremendous dedication and hard work of many linguistics graduate students and LRC Coordinator Maria Zimmer.

Nguyen accepts psychology position at Illinois State

Allison

Professor Allison Nguyen

Allison Nguyen, an MA student in the department, has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Experimental Psychology at Illinois State University, starting next fall. A PhD student in the Department of Psychology, Allison’s dissertation examines how conversational participants negotiate meaning, including how they explicitly signal entering and exiting the negotiation process using expressions like kinda, as well as how misinformation and hyperpartisanship spread. As an MA student in Linguistics, Allison is also completing a thesis: this aims to unify embedded and unembedded rising declaratives by proposing a strategy-based account.

Congratulations, Professor Nguyen!

1 … 15 16 17 18 19 … 378