A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Andrew, a linguistics major, was recently featured in the THI Undergraduate Profile.
Andrew Kato
Andrew participated in the inaugural Undergraduate Research Fellows in Linguistics and Language Science (URFLLS) program and has been working with Professor Pranav Anand, The Humanities Institute Faculty Director and Linguistics Professor, since Spring 2024.
Read more about the story on the THI website, or employing humanities news and stories site.
A new article by Professor Judith Aissen and coauthor Gilles Polian has appeared in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, entitled “Possessor extraction and categorical subject in Tseltalan”. The abstract follows:
The Tseltalan (Mayan) languages, Tsotsil and Tseltal, have two options for extracting the possessor in wh-questions. Wh-movement can either move the entire possessive phrase (‘pied piping’) or it can move the possessor alone, stranding the possessum. Each option is associated with restrictions related to the specificity of the possessum: stranding is possible only when the possessum is non-specific, pied-piping only when it is specific. We focus primarily on the former restriction. Earlier work on Tsotsil, and the related language, Ch’ol, analyzed the derivation with stranding as involving subextraction, i.e., extraction of an internal possessor. We argue that subextraction is not possible at all in Tseltalan and that therefore only an external possessor can be extracted without pied-piping. It is fairly clear that in transitive clauses, possessors of the internal argument are extracted as external possessors, not internal ones, as they extract only as applied objects in an applicative construction. We extend this analysis to unaccusative clauses, arguing that the possessor of the internal argument in an unaccusative clause, as well as to the possessor within certain prepositional phrases, extracts from an external position. We identify this position as Specifier of TP and propose that the phrase which occupies it is interpreted as the subject of a categorical judgment (Kuroda 1972, among others). This analysis accounts for specificity effects in possessor extraction and illuminates issues related to word order, predicative possession, experiential collocations, and the nature of ’topic’ positions in Mayan.
Linguistics majors Katie Arnold and Elliot-Elyjah Mcwhinnie, along with Psychology major and Linguistics minor Audrey Yu, have been selected as 2025 Koret Scholars! This competitive scholarship, which comes with a $2,000 award, is awarded to up to 50 students each year for their exceptional research.
The WHASC Editors invited each of them to share a few words about their research projects:
Katie Arnold
I received the Koret Award for my senior thesis, which investigates the nonnative perception of Italian consonant length. Three participant groups with different Italian proficiencies—naïve, beginner, advanced—will be asked to discriminate between short and long consonants in /VCV/ and /VCCV/ Italian nonce and low-frequency words. The working hypotheses of my thesis are that (i) English speakers will be more sensitive to vowel length differences compared to consonant length differences; (ii) that English speakers will require more dramatic contrasts for accurate discrimination of consonant length while being able to detect more subtle vowel distinctions; and (iii), that language proficiency will have a positive effect on consonant length detection, with advanced listeners detecting short-long differences more accurately than their naïve and beginner counterparts.
Elliot-Elyjah Mcwhinnie
As a Koret scholar, my research will focus on the nuances of African American Language (AAL) in California. Through my research, I seek to understand and discover the participation of AAL speakers in the California Vowel Shift.
Audrey Yu
My research project is entitled “Person or Condition First: Language Effects on Parent-Child Conversations About Traits.” When we speak to children, we often make topics simpler and give information in a way that allows them to be easily digested. We know that parent-child interaction heavily influences how children perceive the world around them (McHugh et al., 2024). However, we currently do not know how parents explain complex topics such as disability and mental illness. Prior work suggest the children think about disabilities in essentialist ways (i.e., due to something internal and unchangeable about the person), which has been linked to bias (Menendez & Gelman, 2024). In this project, I want to investigate how parents explain mental and physical traits (including mental illness and several disabilities) to their children and how this conversations influence how children think about these topics. To explore this, we will recruit 60 parent-child dyads with children 5 to 8 years of age. Each participant will receive a Qualtrics survey where they will be randomly assigned a series of vignettes that use person-first (e.g., “autistic person”) or condition-first language (e.g., “person with autism”). After each vignette, dyads will discuss three questions: Why do you think [character] is [trait]? Would [character]’s kids also be [trait] even if they were raised by someone else? What are some things that you think [character] can or cannot do because they are [trait]? I hypothesize that dyads will be less likely to use essentialist ideas when given stories that are person-first. This project will help elucidate our understanding of how children develop an understanding of disability.
Congratulations, Audrey, Elliot, and Katie!
Professor Louise McNally (PhD, 1992) has been named a 2025 Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). Louise, who is currently Professor in Department of Translation and Language Sciences at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, joins a distinguished group of linguists celebrated for their sustained impact on the field, including several other UC Santa Cruz alumni and faculty.
Congratulations on this well-deserved honor, Louise!
The WHASC Editors recently conducted a virtual interview with Andrew Hedding,
Andrew Hedding
who completed his PhD in Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz in 2022 with a dissertation titled How to Move a Focus: The Syntax of Alternative Particles. After graduating, Andrew joined the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington, where he is now an Assistant Professor.
What kind of research are you working on at present?
Since finishing at UCSC, I’ve continued to work on various aspects of the syntax of Mixtec languages (which was the main focus of my dissertation). A few of my current projects emerged more or less directly out of questions left unanswered by my dissertation (e.g., on non-interrogative uses of wh-words), but I’ve also started a few completely new projects looking at new domains of Mixtec syntax (e.g., on argument structure). One project emerging out of my dissertation is co-authored with Michelle Yuan from UCLA. In a recent NELS presentation, we compared subextraction possibilities in San Martín Peras Mixtec with apparent subextraction in Tseltalan Mayan languages (the Tseltalan data comes from a recent paper by Judith Aissen and Gilles Polian). Though the languages display superficially similar patterns, we identify a number of empirical differences which we correlate with distinct syntactic properties of the languages. Ultimately, we argue that the superficially similar patterns emerge via distinct derivations.
Can you share a bit about your journey from UCSC to your current role at the University of Washington? 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?
After finishing my PhD, I got a position as a one-year visiting professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. During that visiting year, I applied for (and ultimately got) a permanent tenure track position here. On the one hand, I felt prepared for life as a faculty member—I had taught or TAed versions of the same classes while at UCSC, and I had experience balancing my teaching and research responsibilities. At the same time, however, the transition was hard. Between teaching more classes (as the primary instructor), added service responsibilities, meeting new colleagues, and moving to a new city, there were times when it was very overwhelming. I’ve had to be patient with myself, but now that I am in my third academic year at UW, I feel like each quarter is getting a bit easier.
What advice would you give to current UCSC graduate students who are aspiring to enter academia or pursue similar career paths?
At times the job market can be very frustrating and disheartening—I was on the job market for 3 years and faced a lot of rejection. Getting a job requires hard work, but it also requires luck. My advice would be to focus on the things you can control: work hard to create a few research projects that you can be proud of, present at conferences and meet people in your area, cultivate your teaching and mentorship skills, and most of all, be resilient.
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?
Since leaving grad school, I have done more theoretically-informed language description, in addition to my “strictly-theoretical” work. Ben Eischens (another UCSC alum, now at UCLA) and I recently wrote a paper describing the phonology of San Martín Peras Mixtec, another in Spanish that transcribes a personal narrative, and we are currently working on a third that describes the basic morphosyntax of the language. In part, these projects have emerged as we have gained a deeper understanding of the language. However, I think I have also been influenced by colleagues here at UW that have a deep commitment to language documentation and description.
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?
I expect that my future work will continue to focus on various aspects of Mixtec syntax and the ways that it interfaces with semantics and phonology. However, I am also excited by the prospect of collaborating more with colleagues at UW with diverse interests and backgrounds. As an example, I recently collaborated with two computational linguists here to conduct an “iconic” artificial language learning experiment while in Mexico. The artificial language we used is entirely pictographic, so it does not presuppose that participants be familiar with a particular set of sounds or even require that the participants be literate. In principle, this should make it more feasible for a diverse set of participants with varied language backgrounds to participate in this type of experiement. This summer, we ran an experiment which taught participants several different nominal modifiers, and then asked them to produce phrases with multiple modifiers, to see if participants would order them in a scope-isomorphic way. This was a completely different type of project for me, but it was fun, and I’m hoping to find more ways to collaborate with my new colleagues here in the future!
PhD students Maya Wax Cavallaro and Mykel Brinkerhoff recently presented at the 4th Sound Systems of Latin America (SSLA 4) held at the University of Washington. Myke’s talk focused on “Measuring voice quality in Zapotec,” while Maya presented on “Final sonorant consonant devoicing in Mayan and Zapotec.”
At the conference, Maya and Myke also had a chance to reconnect with some UCSC alumni. Ben Eischens (PhD 2022), now an assistant professor at UCLA, presented joint research with graduate student Jahnavi Narkar on “The production of phonation type in San Martín Peras Mixtec” and chaired a session on voice quality. Andrew Hedding (PhD 2022), now an assistant professor at UW, attended the conference and chaired a session on verbal morphology and phonology.
From left to right: Ben Eischens, Maya Wax Cavallaro, Mykel Brinkerhoff, Andrew Hedding
Professor Dustin Chacón and colleagues just published a new paper ‘MEG evidence for left temporal and orbitofrontal involvement in breaking down inflected words and putting the pieces back together‘ in Cortex! This project was headed by Dave Kenneth Tayao Cayado as part of the SAVaNT project, led by Linnaea Stockall. The study uses MEG to examine grammatical words and ungrammatical pseudowords in Tagalog, providing evidence for a multi-stage processing model of complex words: Morphologically complex words decompose in the left fusiform gyrus, followed by separate stages of category licensing in posterior temporal lobe and semantic interpretation in ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This research is particularly significant since it shows this general model of morphological processing applies to inflectional affixes (not only derivational affixes), and is the first to test this in Tagalog. Congratulations, Dustin!
