WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ

The WHASC Editors recently conducted a virtual interview with Ben Eischens, who earned his PhD in Linguistics from UC Santa Cruz in 2022 with a dissertation titled Tone, Phonation, and the Phonology-Phonetics Interface in San Martín Peras Mixtec. Following his graduation, Ben joined the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he currently serves as an Assistant Professor.

A recent photo of Ben visiting Solvang, CA, a Danish-themed town in Santa Barbara County

What kind of research are you working on at present?

Right now, I’m working on a bunch of different projects, each focusing on a different aspect of San Martín Peras Mixtec’s phonology and phonetics. These include the phonetics of phonation and nasality, diachronic sound change, the learning of lexical tendencies in a phonological alternation with lots of exceptions, and whether we can define the Mixtec ‘couplet’ in general phonological terms. I’ve been amazed at just how many different things there are to look at in a single language, and that the list just keeps growing with time.

Can you share a bit about your journey from UCSC to your current role at UCLA? Looking back, what was the transition from life as a graduate student to life as a faculty member like? Did you feel prepared for the transition? Was there anything unexpected that you faced?

It was definitely a big transition! I felt prepared by my time at UCSC for the teaching and research side of things — in some sense, you keep doing the same things, just on a larger scale. The strangest thing for me was that I still felt very much like a graduate student when I started at UCLA, but I suddenly had the role of a faculty member. Thankfully, my colleagues have all been extremely welcoming and supportive, so I feel like I belong in the UCLA Linguistics community.

Looking ahead, what are some of the future directions for your research? Are there new areas or questions in linguistics that you’re excited to explore?

On the more formal side of things, I’ve gotten interested in nasality, and especially in the relationship between its phonetic characteristics and phonological representation. I’ve also still got lots of work to do on the phonology and phonetics of phonation type in Mixtec, which can help us understand more about Silverman’s (1996) so-called ‘laryngeally-complex’ languages, where the same vowel can host orthogonal contrasts in both tone and phonation type. I also see myself doing more and more collaborative work in the future. There are just so many interesting questions to ask, and I don’t have the expertise to address them all. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I’ve been learning that it’s best to team up with others who have the necessary expertise so you can tackle the problem together.

What advice would you give to current UCSC graduate students who are aspiring to enter academia or pursue similar career paths?

My biggest piece of advice is to listen to your advisor. They have a good idea of what you need to do to get where you want to go, and they are genuinely invested in helping you get there. The other thing is to make sure you’re working on things that you enjoy. In my experience, the only way you’ll put in the amount of work needed to complete big research projects is if you get some satisfaction or happiness out of doing the research. That’s not to say it’ll always be fun, even if the topic is something you care deeply about. But you’ll get some fulfillment out of the process, and that can help you keep at it.

How has your research evolved since you graduated from UCSC? Are there any particular influences or experiences that played a major role in shaping your current research focus?

One aspect of my research that has grown (and still has lots of room to growǃ) is on the documentation/description side. I’m learning that there are so many ways to make my fieldwork data accessible and useful to the language community I work with, so I’m working on a number of projects to do that. My biggest influence in this has been the Mixtec community in CA. Members of the community are working in all sorts of different ways to make resources accessible in Mixtec, whether that’s through translation and interpretation, holding an after-school program in Mixtec for the children of Mixtec-speaking parents (see Centro Binacional’s Salinas webpage for info), or advocating for the labor rights of Indigenous migrant farmworkers in CA. While my research on phonation or tone might not immediately seem like it can contribute to this, it turns out that there are lots of ways that it can.

Anissa Zaitsu

The WHASC Editors recently had the chance to chat (virtually) with Anissa Zaitsu, who received her BA and MA in linguistics from UC Santa Cruz in 2018, with a thesis on reduced why-questions. After graduating, Anissa went on to hold a prestigious Baggett Fellowship at the University of Maryland, before joining Stanford University as a PhD student in linguistics, where she is now. Her dissertation on negative concord in African American English is co-supervised by Vera Gribanova, also a Santa Crucian (PhD, 2010).  

Could you tell us about your ongoing dissertation project at Stanford? What are the central questions you’re addressing, and what drew you to them?

My dissertation at Stanford focuses on Negative Concord, and in particular, tracks the distribution and interpretation of Negative Concord Items (NCIs) in African American English (AAE) across a range of syntactically and semantically significant domains. In languages with NC, NCIs display a kind of variation: at times, they seem to convey negative meaning, while at other times, they do not. This variation is especially notable in Non-Strict NC systems, where NCIs routinely occur without an overt marker of clausal negation, particularly in the preverbal subject position. Although many approaches attempt to account for these facts within a unified framework, several critical questions remain unresolved, some of which challenge the viability of a unified approach.

I address these challenges by examining the NC system in AAE, a Non-Strict NC system that, relatively freely, allows Long Distance Negative Concord (LDNC), where an NCI can be separated from its licensing negation by a finite clause boundary. LDNC is useful for probing patterns that might be obscured in monoclausal environments. My research highlights that a key issue in previous approaches is the lack of attention to the semantic properties of NCIs, which should be involved in explaining its dependency on negation. I argue that the cases challenging a unified approach offer valuable insights into the semantic nature of NCI dependencies. Ultimately, I propose that a unified approach to NC is possible, but it requires a more nuanced semantic analysis, allowing for a relatively straightforward syntactic explanation of the dependency.

I have always been drawn to phenomena that reveal the division of labor between syntax and semantics, and my interest in Negative Concord patterns dates back to my time at UC Santa Cruz. I vividly remember my final assignment on Negative Auxiliary Inversion in Jorge Hankamer’s Syntax 1 class, which initially sparked my curiosity in this area. Later, as an MA student, I took Jim McCloskey’s seminar on polarity, where I encountered different theoretical approaches to Negative Concord. It’s rewarding to see my current research connect back to those formative experiences. I’m also proud to demonstrate how fieldwork on non-standard varieties, like AAE, is not only viable but also crucial for answering some of the most challenging theoretical questions.

What has been the most rewarding aspect of your linguistics journey so far, and what challenges have you encountered along the way?

The most rewarding aspect of my linguistics journey has been connecting with people—whether in reading groups, classrooms, conferences, or casual hallway conversations. I love the collaborative effort involved in learning about language together, and being around intellectually curious people is motivating and exhilarating.

The most difficult part, however, is that sometimes we have to be still. We need to sit quietly with our ideas, deconstruct them, and piece them back together on our own. While the conversations you have with others are valuable and help inform this process, at the end of the day, it’s sometimes just you and a blank page. This kind of quietness has always been a bit challenging for me. I’m still working through it, and perhaps it will be a lifelong process, but it is incredibly rewarding when things finally click and the page becomes a kind of interlocutor of its own.

What advice would you give to current undergraduate/MA students at UC Santa Cruz interested in pursuing PhD-level research in linguistics?

Every challenge you face in research is a chance to uncover something new—not just about language, but about yourself. Pay attention to what sparks your curiosity, how you tackle difficult tasks, and what you care most about. Let these discoveries shape your next steps, both in academia and beyond.