Recent faculty publications in phonology and phonetics

The past year has seen a spate of faculty publications in phonology and phonetics. Two are a product of collaborations between Professors Ryan Bennett, Grant McGuire, and Jaye Padgett and co-authors. One, “Effects of syllable position and place of articulation on secondary dorsal contrasts: An ultrasound study of Irish” (Journal of Phonetics, vol. 107), co-authored with Jenny Bellik (PhD, 2019), shows that the Irish palatalization contrast is produced less robustly in syllable codas than in onsets, and more variably in labial consonants and in codas. These results are related to cross-linguistic asymmetries in the occurrence of a palatalization contrast. The second, “Russian palatalization is a matter of the tongue body” (Journal of Slavic Linguistics, vol. 32) argues what its title says and against alternative accounts that view the Russian contrast as primarily one involving pharyngealization or [ATR].

Jaye also saw another article come out over the past year, also a collaboration with co-authors. “An acoustic study of ATR in Tima vowels: Vowel quality, voice quality and duration” (Phonology, vol. 41, e2) provides an acoustic analysis of the ATR contrast in Tima, a very understudied language of Sudan, and shows that voice quality is implicated in the contrast along with the more familiar F1 differences.

Anagnostopoulou colloquium

This Friday (May 23), the Department will welcome Professor Elena Anagnostopoulou (University of Crete and IMS-FORTH), who will give a colloquium talk entitled “Rethinking clitics: A view from Greek” (1:20 pm, Humanities 1, Room 202):

In this talk, I will revisit the relationship between clitic doubling and object agreement in connection to the syntax of clitics, via an assessment of three recent proposals on Greek clitic doubling. I will offer novel evidence based on co-ordination resolution supporting the view that clitic doubling involves a dependency  between a clitic with iφ and a DP with iφ. Finally, I will highlight  arguments that, in my view, are crucial to decide between different versions of movement analyses.

Professor Anagnostopoulou will be sticking around the Department next week, when she will give a two-day mini-course on parameters.

Anand, Hardt, and McCloskey in LI

The most recent issue of Linguistic Inquiry (volume 56, issue 2) has just appeared and it contains a paper by Professors Pranav Anand, Dan Hardt, and Jim McCloskey called “The Domain of Formal Matching in Sluicing.” This paper, like the 2019 paper by Deniz Rudin (PhD, 2018; USC) that it replies to and builds on (“Head-Based Syntactic Identity in Sluicing,” which also appeared in Linguistic Inquiry), emerged from the Santa Cruz Ellipsis Project, a project funded by the National Science Foundation which was active in the department between 2013 and 2019.

Santa Cruz linguists at WCCFL

The 43rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 43) took place a couple weekends ago at the University of Washington (April 25-27), with several Santa Crucians in attendance.

PhD student Aidan Katson gave a talk on Korean honorification as a window to understanding animacy,” while PhD student Niko Webster presented a poster on “The syntactic and semantic introduction of internal arguments.” Professor Mia Gong gave a talk on “Specification of D Derives Variation in Relative Clauses” (with Eszter Ótott-Kovács) and presented a poster, “Scrambling through the Looking Glass: Two Types of Movement across Weak Islands.” Professor Maziar Toosarvandani was also in attendance as an audience member.

The Santa Cruz students and faculty got a chance to catch up with some past members of the department. Professor Ruth Kramer (PhD, 2009; Georgetown) gave a talk on “Passivization, speech act participants, and third-person probes in Jarawara” (with Luke Adamson). Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv), a recent visitor in the Department, co-presented a talk, “The bilingual lexicon under Distributed Morphology: An investigation of gender agreement in code-switching.” Professor Andrew Hedding (PhD, 2022), now an Assistant Professor at UW, was on hand as one of the conference’s organizers.

Santa Cruz linguists at the poster session
Santa Cruz linguists at the conference dinner
Niko Webster presenting his poster
Mia Gong in front of her poster
Andrew Hedding helping put up Mia’s poster
Aidan Katson giving their talk

Colloquium: Matt Wagers

Last Friday, the Department held a colloquium with Professor Matt Wagers as the invited speaker. Matt’s talk was entitled “Setting healthy (mnemonic) boundaries”:

Nearly 20 years ago, Lewis & Vasishth (2005) applied the ACT-R modeling framework to language processing by creating an English parser fragment embedded in an associative memory. McElree (2000) and McElree, Foraker & Dyer (2003) informed this development by providing earlier arguments in favor of such a content-addressable memory. This proved to be hugely influential because it offered a general theory of dependency resolution which could be made precise by reference to any particular theory of linguistic features. Both strands of thought reoriented thinking in the field away from models of working memory that required serial search procedures and, generally, the discovery of widespread interference effects has vindicated that shift. Much recent research has made progress in delineating what the representations are (Yadav et al. 2023, Keshev et al. 2025) and how they can be learned in an unsupervised manner (Ryu & Lewis 2021). Relatively unexplored is how to characterize the information that can be attended to simultaneously, sometimes called the “focus of attention” (Oberauer & Hein 2012). This is an important commitment of models like ACT-R and provides an attractive point of articulation to theories of locality or linguistic domains. In this talk, I will survey what we know (and don’t know) about the focus of attention in language processing (Wagers & McElree 2013, 2022) and relate it to recent thinking about the dynamics of context encoding (Healey, Long & Kahana 2019; Balachandran, Wagers & Rich 2025).

After the colloquium, students and faculty took a walk down by the ocean at the Coastal Sciences Campus, where a pod of whales was spotted, as well as at least one otter (photo courtesy of Jungu Kang).

A sea otter

Banana Slugs moving on

As the academic year comes to a close, we’re proud to celebrate our graduating students and recent alumni as they embark on their next steps in linguistics and beyond. This year, Banana Slugs are headed to a variety of excellent graduate programs, fellowships, and professional opportunities. Whether continuing to pursue research in linguistics or exploring new paths and territories, our students carry with them the skill and curiosity honed at UCSC to their next chapters. Congratulations to all — we can’t wait to see where your journeys take you!

Katie Arnold, MA program at University of British Columbia

This fall, I will be joining the UBC Department of Linguistics as a MA student! I’ll be working with Dr. Anne-Michelle Tessier in her Child Phonology Lab. I’m looking forward to this opportunity to continue developing my research skills and learning about linguistics.

Katie Arnold

Jackson Confer, Baggett Fellowship and PhD Program at the University of Maryland 

After taking a break from my studies for a year, I decided to apply for the Baggett Fellowship at University of Maryland. After spending some time here, I completely fell in love with the department; when it came time to apply to grad schools this cycle, I already knew that I wanted to stay. I really appreciate the explicit marriage between formal and experimental approaches here and the extensive cross-talk that comes with that. In the fellowship, I’ve mostly been doing formal work on the syntax of exceptives and coordination, but I plan to add an experimental dimension to this work as I transition into the PhD program.

Jackson Confer

Andrew Kato, PhD Program at UCLA

With a strong history of research in formal semantics and the syntax-semantics interface, I’ll be heading to UCLA as a PhD student starting Fall ’25. The department’s large size even beyond its s-side faculty also makes for a good opportunity to explore lingering interests of mine in other subfields, mainly computational linguistics and philosophy of language.

Andrew Kato

Sadie Lewis, Baggett Fellowship at the University of Maryland, PhD program at University of Chicago

During my Baggett Fellowship I worked with Masha Polinsky mainly doing fieldwork on Kaqchikel (Mayan). I started working on negation in that language which was my main project. I stayed another semester on her grant “Variations in Exceptive Structures” and completed a project on Thai. Now I am working with Hedde Zeijlstra to work more on negation in Mayan. I will spend the summer in Göttingen and do some work on his ERC grant “Unpacking Paradigmatic Gaps”. Additionally, I have accepted a place at University of Chicago for a PhD in linguistics. I will start this Fall. I am hoping to work with Karlos (Arregi) and Erik (Zyman) and continue working on Kaqchikel.

Sadie Lewis

Akira Santerre, Certification of Pre-SLP at CSU San Marcos

Since I’m switching majors from Linguistics to Speech Language Pathology for my Master’s, I enrolled in a Certification of Pre-SLP at CSU San Marcos. It’s like a post-bacc. It’s nice because I can save money by completing all my prerequisite courses online. After I complete this, in a year, I’ll be all set to apply to a regular SLP master’s program. I’m hoping to get into CSU Long Beach. In the meantime, I’m planning to log some observation hours this summer!

Akira Santerre

Akira Santerre

Ivy Shaw, PhD in Romance Languages & Literatures at UC Berkeley 

I’m incredibly excited to be starting as a PhD student in the Romance Languages and Literatures program at UC Berkeley this fall! The program allows for a comparative study of the linguistics of three Romance Languages, while also developing an in-depth knowledge of a primary language, mine being French. The program is interdisciplinary in nature, and I was drawn to the flexibility of designing a unique and personalized course load with a diversity of linguistic topics and approaches suited to exactly what I want to study. I look forward to expanding on the research I did as an undergrad at UCSC in Old French syntax and also in L2 phonology. The faculty and resources offered at Berkeley are incredible and I couldn’t be happier to be continuing my study of linguistics there. 

Ivy Shaw

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