A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow Jaime Pérez González has accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Linguistics at UC Santa Barbara. In 2022-2023, Jaime will finish his post-doc in UCSC Linguistics, and will then begin at UC Santa Barbara in Fall of 2023. Congrats, Jaime!
Alumnus Jed Sam Pizarro Guevara (PhD, 2020) has been awarded an NSF SBE Postdoctoral Fellowship. Under the sponsorship of Brian Dillon (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), he will carry out a 2-year research project on the processing of reflexive pronouns in Tagalog. He will be deploying a series of visual world experiments to investigate the extent to which structural information (e.g., c-command and locality relations) and semantic information (e.g., thematic relations) are leveraged to guide the real-time interpretation of reflexives in the language. Over the course of this project, he will be working with scholars at UMass and the University of the Philippines, Diliman.
Adam Morgan (MA, 2013) has been awarded an F32 Individual Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers from the NIH. Adam is currently a postdoctoral scholar at NYU School of Medicine. His project will use ECoG (neurosurgical electrocorticography) to map networks of lexical activation and detect neural population synchrony involved in the production of syntax. Congratulations, Adam!
Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow Jaime Pérez González has had a short story published in Latin@ Literatures, an online source for contemporary discussion on Latinx literature and culture. Beautiful writing, Jaime, and thanks for sending it along!
Continuing the trend, the WHASC Editor has interviewed another of the newer members of the department: this time, Delaney Gomez-Jackson, a student in the BA/MA program.
WHASC Editor: So you’re from the South Bay. How would you define that identity? Do you specifically identify as someone from San Jose, or as more of a general Bay Area Native?
Delaney: I would define the South Bay area identity as very tech-oriented — Santa Clara County, in particular. Depending on who I’m talking with, I’ll tell people I’m from Silicon Valley (which I think registers more with people than saying San Jose/Santa Clara) or from “near San Francisco.” Ultimately, I think my identity aligns more with a sort of general Bay Area identity.
WHASC Editor: During our interview, you mentioned a sort of “South Bay English.” Could you tell us a bit more about that? Is it a distinct thing? And what’s the place of “hella” in that variety?
Delaney: Aside from maybe tech-related terms, I think South Bay Area English is part of a general Bay Area English, which has unique lexical items compared to other California Englishes. One of the more well-known Bay Area words is “hella,” which has become pretty integrated into most California Englishes.
WHASC Editor: So you mentioned during our interview that you started off as a literature major. Could you tell us a bit more about how you came to linguistics? Was there a particular moment, or set of moments, that led you down this path?
Delaney: While I was applying to undergrad here as a Literature major, I was taking an advanced literature class in high school and realized the major wouldn’t be a good fit for me. I changed my major to Linguistics before starting my first quarter as an undergrad without really knowing what linguistics entailed besides “studying languages.” After I took Intro to Linguistics, I was intrigued by the different areas of study I could explore within the major. I really started enjoying linguistics when I took Semantics I the following quarter; I was taking it concurrently with a logic class, so maybe I was especially drawn to a concentration in semantics! My decision to declare Linguistics as my major was solidified after I survived Syntax I, and since those pivotal quarters, I’ve been interested in the syntax-semantics interface.
WHASC Editor: Finally, the quintessential closer: with the first year of classes under your belt, what’s the advice that you’d give to the incoming class of graduate students?
Delaney: The workload of your first year is intense, and it’s easy to feel burnt out by being so preoccupied with it. Do everything you can to dedicate one full, weekend day to yourself. Get to know Santa Cruz and the other folks in your cohort!
It was announced on April 28 that Distinguished Professor Emerita Sandra Chung has been elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. One of the oldest learned societies in the United States, election to membership is a signal honor. Congratulations, Sandy!
You can read the full announcement here. You can find a list of the newest members here: https://www.amacad.org/new-members-2022, where you’ll note that Sandy immediately alphabetically precedes incoming classmates Sandra Cisneros and Glenn Close.
After emerging from an obligatory two-week home quarantine in Tokyo, Junko and Armin were involved (mostly virtually…) in linguistic activities at the Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) with their collaborator Haruo Kubozono (who was a one-year Fulbright scholar in our department in 1994-95). In the process, they presented at the Prosody and Grammar Festa (Jan 29-30, 2022) “Postnasal Voicing and the stratified lexicon of Japanese” (https://www2.ninjal.ac.jp/
Besides these activities, they were involved in two editorial projects. The first is with Haruo Kubozono, Oxford University Press, Prosody and Prosodic Interfaces, publication date: 05/12/2022. It contains contributions by Ryan Bennett (UCSC PhD 2012), Robert Henderson (UCSC PhD 2012), and Megan Harvey, on lexical pitch in Uspanteko as well as our joint paper with Jennifer Bellik (UCSC PhD 2019) and Nick Kalivoda (UCSC PhD. 2018) on matching and alignment. Junko (who is a fan of penguins) is very happy with the front cover of the volume!
https://global.oup.com/
Oh yes, in between all of this, they went to a Kabuki performance, a sumo tournament, and warmed up in hot spring onsens in Tohoku and Hakone.