Summer dissertations defended

Four PhD students defended their dissertations at the end of spring quarter or over the summer:

  • Andrew Hedding: “How to move a focus: The syntax of alternative particles” (June 7)
  • Benjamin Eischens: “Tone, phonation, and the phonology-phonetics interface in San Martín Peras Mixtec” (June 8)
  • Nick van Handel: “The sound of silence: Investigations of implicit prosody” (June 30)
  • Andrew Angeles: “Recursivity, prosodic adjunction, and the role of informativeness in Kansai Japanese compound nouns” (August 25)

Congratulations to all four, and best of luck in your future pursuits!

Arvindam receives the 2022 Gibson/Fedorenko Young Scholar Award

Fourth year PhD student Vishal Arvindam received the inaugural 2022 Gibson/Fedorenko Young Scholar Award. The prize, which honors two young scholars who have presented an outstanding talk at the Conference on Human Sentence Processing, comes with $1,000. Vishal’s talk (in collaboration with Matt Wagers) was entitled “Anti-local anaphors in Telugu are subject to local antecedent interference.” 

Congratulations, Vishal!

Professor Roumyana Pancheva joins the department

Roumyana Pancheva, who is currently Professor of Linguistics and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California, will be joining the Department of Linguistics in Winter 2023.

Professor Pancheva’s research is in syntax, semantics, and their interface. She uses formal models to investigate synchronic linguistic variation and diachronic change, with a particular focus on Bulgarian and other Slavic languages. Professor Pancheva has made important contributions to the theories of degree expressions, person and perspective, tense and aspect, evidentiality, and clitics and clause structure. Her research is also innovative for integrating formal modeling with experimental methods, in particular brain imaging.

Her papers have appeared in a range of influential journals, including Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, the Journal of Semantics, and Brain and Language. Professor Pancheva has been supported by a prestigious New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation, as well as grants from the National Science Foundation.

Congratulations, Roumi, and welcome to Santa Cruz!

Summer publications

The Department’s faculty and students saw a number of their publications appear in print over the summer, including:

Vincent, Sichel, and Wagers in Languages

An update from Jake Vincent:

Ivy, Matt, and I had an article published in Languages recently (May 11). It’s based on the experimental work on English relative clauses (RCs) that started with my second QP and culminated in my dissertation. It presents experimental evidence that non-presuppositional environments affect a relative clause’s resistance to extraction even in English. In particular, (a) RCs inside of DPs serving as non-verbal predicates of a clause and RCs inside the nominal pivot of a there-existential give rise to a substantially reduced island effect (compared to extraction from a transitive object), and (b) RCs inside of transitive objects may give rise to a reduced island effect when the transitive verb is used in an existential way. The paper also describes what we believe to be a methodological innovation somewhat akin to priming by which the effects of discourse context on sentence acceptability can be measured without modifying the nature of the judgment task.

Congrats, Jake, Matt, and Ivy!

LURC 2022

Today marks the annual meeting of the Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC). This year’s lineup featured four excellent talks by our undergraduates: (1) Animacy in Globally Ambiguous Sentences, by Briana Bugarin, Jackson Confer, Joyce Hong, Owen O’Brien, and Isabel Pacheco, (2) Local Syntactic Coherence Effects across Lexical Categories, by Sarah Lee, Sadira Lewis, Haley Okumura, (3) T-Glottalization in Utahn English, by Kim Tan, and (4) English Inversion and the EPP, by Emilio Gonzalez. All of this was followed up by another talk by distinguished alum Eric Baković: Vowel Harmony Functions, Complexity, and Interactions. The conference was a great success, and WHASC extends a congratulations and a thank you to everyone who organized and/or participated in this event. The full details can be found here.

Incoming First Years

The department is excited to welcome five incoming students next year: Ian Carpick, Richard Wang, and Sebahat Yağmur Kiper (PhD track) and Larry Lyu and Duygu Demiray (MA track). Their bios are attached below. Welcome, everyone!

Ian Carpick holds a BA in Linguistics from the University of British Columbia. His main interest is in the architecture of theoretical frameworks such as Optimality Theory, as well as theoretical phonology more generally, and long-distance interactions. His undergraduate thesis surveyed approaches to non-local dissimilation of nasal + obstruent clusters in the Austronesian languages Mori Bawah and Timugon Murut, and the Australian language Gurindji.

Duygu Demiray holds a BA in Linguistics from Boğaziçi University. Their research interests cluster around psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and theoretical linguistics. Their BA thesis, “Estimating the Effect of Uninformed Responses: Application of an MPT Model,” applied a Bayesian MPT model on sentences processing results from Turkish to explore the effects of uninformed responses on experimental results.

Yağmur Kiper received a BA in Foreign Language Education and an MA in English Language Teaching from Middle East Tech University. Her main interest is in theoretical syntax. Her MA thesis, “In the Case of Sluicing,” sought to build unified analyses of sluicing in Turkish regardless of the clause type.

Larry Lyu is completing a BA in Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His interest in the interaction of phonology and phonetics with historical linguistic theory and historical data has led him to explore diachronic sound change and high vowel fricativization in such languages as his native Nantong. In his free time, he collaborates with various activist groups on the documentation and revitalization of endangered languages.

Richard Wang is currently pursuing a BA and MA in Linguistics from UCLA. His interest in phonetics has led him to explore the phonetic cues to prosodic structures across languages, and his research in phonology has used OT to investigate the prosody of rhotic lenition in Mandarin. He would like to perform fieldwork on prosody, especially in the American Indigenous languages, Austronesian languages, and understudied Chinese varieties.

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