Six Slugs A-sinnin’!

According to Wiktionary, a collective of slugs may be referred to as a cornucopia. With all due emphasis on that modal, there’s no denying that Banana Slugs were copious at last month’s edition of Sinn und Bedeutung. Held at Goethe University Frankfurt, SuB30 featured presentations from many community members:

You can see most of these folks pictured below!

(l to r): Sharf, Knick, Hofmann, Unidentified Frankfurter, Li, Tamura. Not pictured: Cao.

Biba Bibbs!

Earlier this July, Richard Bibbs defended his dissertation on Phonological Asymmetries from Phonetic Substance: Case Studies in the Special Status of Laryngeals (chaired by Ryan Bennett, with committee members Grant and Amanda). That, of course, merits its own kudos, but … there’s more.

While Richard has left the halls of Stevenson, he hasn’t wandered too far: on 9/15, he started his new role as an Undergraduate Advisor in the Economics department here on campus. Richard reports that he is excited to continue helping UCSC students, now outside of the Linguistics major. He promises to visit the department when he can, but you can visit him too: his new digs are in Engineering 2.

Welcome to Fall 2025!

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! 

The department at the fall welcome event

Banana Slugs at AMP 2025

This year’s Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2025) was held September 25–26 at UC Berkeley, and UCSC was well represented by both current graduate students and alumni.

Among our current grads, Jonathan Paramore gave a talk titled “Modeling Phonetic Neutralization in Exemplar Theory.” Hanyoung Byun presented “Lenis obstruent voicing in Seoul Korean: Phonological or phonetic?”. Hanyoung’s abstract was also selected for the Best Student Abstract Award. Larry Lyu presented a poster, “The local meets the non-local: assimilation-induced transparency in vowel harmony.”

Hanyoung Byun
Jonathan Paramore
Larry Lyu

We were also delighted to see several UCSC alumni at AMP this year, including Eric Baković (UC San Diego; BA 1993), Ben Eischens (UCLA; PhD 2022), Sara Finley (Pacific Lutheran University; BA 2003), Aaron Kaplan (University of Utah; PhD 2008), and Ben Sommer (BA 2025).

From left to right: Ben Sommer, Jonathan Paramore, Hanyoung Byun, Ben Eischens, Aaron Kaplan, Larry Lyu, Eric Baković

Paramore in Journal of the International Phonetic Association

PhD student Jonathan Paramore recently published an article in Journal of the International Phonetic Association titled “The acoustic correlates of word-level stress and focus-related prominence in Mankiyali,” coauthored with Aurangzeb, a native speaker of Mankiyali. Congratulations, Jonathan!

Abstract: This paper investigates the acoustic correlates of word-level stress and phrase-level focus-related prominence in Mankiyali, a highly endangered Indo-Aryan language spoken in Northwest Pakistan that utilizes a weight-sensitive stress system. Of the acoustic properties measured (duration, f0, intensity, spectral tilt, and vowel quality), duration was the only feature found to robustly and consistently correlate with word-level stress across syllable types. In contrast, phrase-level focus-related prominence corresponded to an amplification of all five acoustic features measured. Given that vowel duration serves a vital role in preserving lexical contrast in Mankiyali, these findings present difficulties for a strong version of the Functional Load Hypothesis, which claims that acoustic properties bearing a high functional load in a language will not be used to mark prominence. In addition, results support an analysis of Mankiyali’s stress system as having five distinct levels of weight, a pattern which is extremely rare, if not unattested, elsewhere in the world’s languages.

Spring 2025 End-of-year celebration

On Thursday, June 12, the Linguistics Department held its End-of-Year Celebration in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge for our graduating students. The event brought together faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, friends, and family from across the UCSC linguistics community.

Here are a few highlights from the celebration:

  • Undergraduate Advising and Program Coordinator Gwyn Vandevere
  • Professor and Undergraduate Program Director Maziar Toosarvandani
  • Professor and Department Chair Matt Wagers

 

 

Santa Crucians at SALT

The 35th meeting of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 35) recently took place at Harvard University (May 20-22). Professor Adrian Brasoveanu gave a talk entitled “Towards a Cognitively Plausible Quantitative Formalization of Counterfactual Interpretation.” Several department alumni were also in attendance, including Professor Chris Barker (PhD, 1991; NYU) and the following presenters:

Pictured (from left to right): Robert Henderson, Scott AnderBois, Jack Duff, Chris Barker, Adrian Brasoveanu, and Kelsey Sasaki

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