WHASC Profile: Sarah Amador

Last August, Sarah Arantza Amador joined Linguistics as our new Department Manager. Sarah came to us most immediately from Community Studies, but she’s brought us over a decade of experience from her career here at UCSC, with roles in Stevenson, Merrill, Politics, LALS, MCD Bio and EEB, spanning undergraduate teaching, graduate advising and program management.

We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Sarah and pose to her the WHASC Questionnaire (which, the Editors aver, ranks somewhere below Andy Warhol’s but probably above James Lipton’s).

Joining Linguistics, in the Humanities Division, represents a kind of homecoming for you. (Before completing the M.A. at NYU, Sarah earned the B.A. at UCSC in 2005, in Literature and in Philosophy, with Honors). What has changed or surprised you?
I’m a UCSC Humanities alumna and Stevensonian (Maria has a pretty good view of my old dorm room from her office window!), and when I joined Linguistics last August, I was surprised by how good it felt to come back to Stevenson. Stevenson Academic feels like home, and everyone in our department and division has been so welcoming. A nice change: I’m happy to see that the “smokers’ bench” at the southeast corner of our building has been replaced with a patch of wildflowers.
In the Fall Quarter, you made a pretty special journey to Iceland. What took you there, and what did you do?
I went to Iceland for a writing retreat with fellow flash fiction writers who I’d only had the pleasure of working with online previously – it was wonderful! Afterwards, my partner Richard and I spent another week eating cinnamon buns, stocking up on Icelandic novels and wool, and chasing sheep and the aurora. We drove six hours through snow and black ice to visit the Icelandic Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft in a remote corner of the island — it was a dream!
What’s on your horizon in 2022? Any more trips, special projects, or things you’d like to try?
Knitting sweaters, finishing my novel by the end of the year, and visiting my family and friends in Spain, if COVID allows.
Sarah Amador by the Öxarárfoss Waterfall in Þingvellir National Park, Iceland

She did go chasing waterfalls: Öxarárfoss, in Þingvellir National Park

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.

Slugs at the LSA

Many past and present UCSC linguists will be presenting at the up-coming Annual Meeting of the LSA (6-9, January 2022). In chronological order:

Friday (January 7)

D-linking and the effects of contextual set restriction (poster session)

Yuki Seo^^ (University of Delaware) & Rebecca Tollan (University of Delaware)
^^UCSC exchange undergrad from Japan, 2016-17^^

The Development of Vowel Length as a Subphonemic Cue (in-person presentation)

Abigail Fergus (College of William and Mary), Kaitlyn Harrigan (College of William and Mary), & Anya Hogoboom** (College of William and Mary)
**PhD Alum**

Saturday (January 8)

The Irreducible Uncertainty of Ranking and Ordering (poster session)

Eric Bakovic^^ (University of California, San Diego) & Jason Riggle^% (University of Chicago)
^^UCSC BA^^ and %%MA%%

Pre-nominal mí in San Martín Peras Mixtec (poster session)

Lisa Hofmann~~ (University of California, Santa Cruz) & Jason Ostrove** (University of California, Santa Cruz)
~~Current PhD student~~ and **PhD Alum**

Competence meets performance: New perspectives on information structure (hybrid presentation)

Andrew Hedding~~ (University of California, Santa Cruz) & Morwenna Hoeks~~ (University of California, Santa Cruz)
~~Current PhD students~~

Congrats to Vera Gribanova (Ph.D. ’10) for winning the C. L. Baker Award!

More alum accolades at the LSA!

It was announced by the LSA on November 2nd that UCSC alumna Vera Gribanova is to be honored at the 2022 Winter Meeting as the second winner of the C. L. Baker Award. This award recognizes excellence in research in the area of syntactic theory on the part of a scholar who is at the mid-point of a distinguished career. Vera was recognized for her work on the interactions among word-formation, ellipsis, and head-movement, for the sophistication of her work on Russian, and for pioneering investigations of Uzbek (an under-studied language of the Turkic family).

Vera earned the PhD at Santa Cruz in 2010 and has been in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford since the Fall of that year. She was tenured at Stanford in 2018.

Hedding and Toosarvandani at NELS

Andrew Hedding and Maziar Toosarvandani presented at NELS 52 this weekend, which was held (virtually) at Rutgers.

 

Andrew gave a talk titled Possible and Impossible Movements within the Mixtec DP, about pied-piping with inversion and subextraction in San Martín Peras Mixtec and what these phenomena can tell us about the way that foci move syntactically.

Maziar gave a talk titled Locating Animacy in the Grammar, on the relationship between person features and animacy through the lens of Sierra Zapotec.

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