Tom Roberts accepts computational linguistics position at Utrecht

Tom Roberts (PhD, 2021) has recently accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics in the Department of Languages, Literature, and Communication at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, starting in November 2023. Tom’s research focuses on the semantics-pragmatics interface, especially of attitude verbs and speech acts, and how these can (and can’t) vary across languages. This won’t be much of a move for Tom, as he has been just down the road from Utrecht as a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam since leaving UCSC, so he will thankfully not have to give up his omafiets (a roadster bike, literally “grandma bike”).

Banana slugs at the Summer Institute

Linguists from UC Santa Cruz are well represented at the 2023 Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute, which is taking place June 19-July 14 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Rising second year PhD student Richard Wang is in attendance, after receiving a highly selective Linguistic Institute Fellowship.

Professor Matt Wagers is co-teaching a course on Field Psycholinguistics, with PhD alumnus Jed Pizarro Guevara (PhD 2020), who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at UMass.

Other banana slugs in attendance include Professor Eric Bakovic (BA, 1993), who is teaching a course on What Exactly is Phonological Opacity, Professor Kyle Rawlins (PhD, 2008), who is teaching a course on Advanced Pragmatics, and Professor Aaron White (BA, 2009), who is teaching a course on Representation Learning for Syntactic and Semantic Theory.

Numerous defenses defended successfully

This Spring quarter has been particularly active with defenses, with numerous graduate students successfully defending their MA thesis or qualifying paper:

MA Theses

  • Delaney Gomez-Jackson: “Question and indefinites in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec” (Jess Law, Roumi Pancheva, and Maziar Toosarvandani, chair)
  • Matthew Kogan: “Maintaining syntactic positions and thematic roles in memory” (Grant McGuire, Ivy Sichel, and Matt Wagers, chair)
  • Elif Ulusoy: “Connectivity and case effects in agreement attraction: The case of Turkish” (Jorge Hankamer, Amanda Rysling, and Matt Wagers, chair)

Qualifying Papers

  • Jonathan Paramore: “Codas are universally moraic” (Ryan Bennett, Jaye Padgett, and Rachel Walker, chair)
  • Eli Sharf: “Identificational appositives” (Jess Law, Ivy Sichel, and Maziar Toosarvandani, chair)
  • Jun Tamura: “Compounding words in the syntax can produce phrasal phonology: Evidence from Aoyagi morphemes (Ryan Bennett, chair, Mia Gong, and Rachel Walker)
  • Maya Wax Cavallaro: “The syllable in domain generalization: Evidence from artificial language learning” (Ryan Bennett, Grant McGuire, Jaye Padgett, chair)

In addition, several students advanced to candidacy, successfully completing their qualifying exam:

  • Lalitha Balachandran: “Linguistic memory domains in off-line sentence memory and on-line language comprehension” (Amanda Rysling, Maziar Toosarvandani, Matt Wagers, chair, and Ming Xiang (University of Chicago))
  • Myke Brinkerhoff: “Acoustic discriminability of phonation in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec” (Ryan Bennet, Marc Garallek (UC San Diego), Grant McGuire, Jaye Padgett, chair)
  • Dan Brodkin: “Locality and extraction in Mandar” (Ryan Bennett, Sandy Chung, chair, McCloskey, Ileana Paul (University of Western Ontario))
  • Yaqing Cao: “Is there head movement in negation and modals?” (Bryan Donaldson (Languages and Applied Linguistics), Jess Law, Ivy Sichel, chair, Maziar Toosarvandani)
  • Max Kaplan: “Phonotactic repair of onset clusters: Confusability and expectations” (Mark Amengual (Languages and Applied Linguistics), Ryan Bennett, chair, Grant McGuire, Amanda Rysling)

Congratulations to all the students who completed a milestone!

Erik Zyman’s research in the news

Erik Zyman (PhD, 2018), currently Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago, was recently featured in Tableau, the University of Chicago’s humanities magazine. He described his research in syntax:

As a theoretical syntactician, he is interested in “identifying the fundamental operations that build syntactic structure in human language.” One basic operation, which linguists call Merge, combines two words or phrases into a larger unit. Although Merge is fundamental to many versions of generative syntax—an approach according to which grammar is governed by deep laws—Zyman says the operation is difficult to define with precision while both satisfying the relevant conceptual requirements (elegance, simplicity, and others) and accounting for the properties that the relevant syntactic structures have in human language. In a forthcoming article in the journal Syntax, Zyman says he “develops a novel formal definition of Merge that overcomes some drawbacks of previous ones while building on their strengths.”

Zyman aligns himself with a tradition of seeking order beneath complexity: “The second-century Alexandrian syntactician Apollonius Dyscolus was convinced that syntax is fundamentally orderly and rationally comprehensible. Nearly two millennia later, Noam Chomsky, building on a view of Galileo’s, stated that ‘Nature is in fact simple and it’s the task of the scientists to show how that’s the case.’ I agree with both of them.”

Erik Zyman

Professor Erik Zyman (on the right)

Walker in Nijmegen

On June 1, Professor Rachel Walker presented a paper on “Metaphony and asymmetric positional activity” at the Phonetics and Phonology in Europe (PaPE) satellite workshop on “Metaphony: Theoretical, Descriptive, and Typological issues” at Radboud University in Nijmegen. She was also a co-organizer of the workshop. Aaron Kaplan (PhD, 2008), currently Associate Professor at the University of Utah), was also in attendance, giving an invited talk on “Prominence conflicts in Bolognese.”

Another successful LURC

LURC Presenters, standing in front of log in Stevenson CourtyardOn June 2, students and faculty in the department gathered for the Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC). This annual conference celebrates the groundbreaking research of Language Studies and Linguistics majors and is always a highlight of the department’s academic year calendar. 

This year’s LURC was no exception, featuring nine posters on a range of topics in phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics, syntax, and semantics:

  • Cal Boye-Lynn, Killian Kiuttu, and Mackenzi Rauls: Everyone loves complements: Complementizer-determiner ambiguity and acceptability
  • Tony Butorovich, Claire Wellwood, and Max Xie: Production of English /r/ by prosodic position
  • Sophie Green, Shaya Karasso, and Josh Lieberstein: Ambiguity Advantage Effect in Wh-questions
  • Nicholas Hanson: Conveyances of sarcasm in written language
  • Colin Hirschberg: Affectedness in passives
  • Sadira Lewis: Events and ambiguity in -er nominals: An experimental approach
  • Stephen Migdal: “At least,” QUD, and Pragmatic Enrichment of NNPs
  • Wilson Wenhao Sun: OT account for consonant clusters in Cantonese loanword phonology
  • Nishant Suria: A phonetic investigation of the retroflex approximant in Tamil

After brief presentations and a discussion period, the Distinguished Alumna Speaker Caroline Andrews (BA, Linguistics, 2011) spoke on “Optionality and commitment: Sentence planning in an ergative language.” Dr. Andrews received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2019, and she is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich.

Bennett at HISPhonCog

Last week, Professor Ryan Bennett presented a talk at HISPhonCog in Seoul, entitled “Syllable position in secondary dorsal contrasts: an ultrasound study of Irish.” While there, he had the opportunity to catch up with some past and future students in the department. Maho Morimoto (PhD, 2020) also presented at the conference, and incoming PhD student Hanyoung Byun was in attendance as well.

HisPhonCog

Maho Morimoto, Hanyoung Byun, Ryan Bennett (from left to right)

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