Alyssa Scarsciotti begins Peace Corps service

Alyssa Scarsciotti

Alyssa Scarsciotti

Alumna Alyssa Scarsciotti (BA Linguistics, 2020) is embarking on a tour in Costa Rica for the Peace Corp, as part of the first cohort of volunteers to serve overseas after the pandemic. Her journey from Stevenson College to Latin America was featured in a recent news article. Alyssa credited many professors for transforming her academic journey,  including Linguistics faculty Pranav Anand, Jorge Hankamer, Junko Ito, Ivy Sichel, and Maziar Toosarvandani.

Bibbs receives Hankamer Award

On May 19, Richard Bibbs was honored as this year’s recipient of the Jorge Hankamer Outstanding Graduate Instructor in Linguistics.  From the award citation:

This award, given to one graduate student TA each year, is named after Professor Emeritus Jorge Hankamer, whose dedication to pedagogy within Linguistics and the University at large has been an inspiration to and cornerstone of our department for many years. In recognition of his numerous contributions to teaching, course design, and mentorship of his fellow TAs.

Richard Bibbs

Richard Bibbs, Professor Ryan Bennett (Graduate Program Director), Professor Matt Wagers (Chair) (from left to right)

Humanities Fellowships Awarded to Linguistics Graduate Students

The outstanding research of several graduate students in Linguistics was recently recognized by the Humanities Division.

Fifth-year PhD students Jack Duff and Morwenna Hoeks were each awarded one-quarter Dissertation Completion Fellowships for the 2023-2024 academic year. Jack’s dissertation, “On the timing of pragmatic inferences in comprehension,” profiles how narrative conventions like prototypical cause-and-effect plot structure invite readers to draw inferences that go beyond what is said in a text and explores how the reader’s path to those inferences is mediated by the external pressure facing them as they read. Morwenna’s dissertation, “Alternatives in context: Investigations on the processing of focus,” uses the interpretation of focus—a grammatical device all languages have for highlighting important information—to build psycholinguistic theories of language comprehension and prediction.

In addition, the Humanities Institute (THI) awarded summer research fellowships to fourth-year PhD student Vishal Arvindam and second-year PhD student Jonathan Paramore. Vishal’s award will support travel to India this summer to perform fieldwork for his dissertation, “Processing of anti-local reflexives in Telugu.” Jonathan’s award will support his travel to Pakistan to perform fieldwork for a research project on nasalization in Punjabi and Mankiyali.

WCCFL 41 takes place at UC Santa Cruz

This past weekend (May 5-7) saw over 125 linguists from around the world convene in and around Stevenson College for the 41st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 41). They presented 42 talks and 39 posters, on a wide range of topics in theoretical phonology, syntax, and semantics. Two special sessions brought together specialists on phi-features and deixis and anaphora; one virtual poster session enabled presenters not able to attend in person to participate; three invited speakers gave plenary talks on social gender and nominal structure, locality at the morphology-phonology interface, and demonstrative expressions.

The photo gallery below captures the lively spirit of the conference, which featured a conference dinner and other social events, alongside the talks and posters. For some attendees, the conference ended in a visit to the giant redwoods at Henry Cowell State Park, where a special session on “root structure” was held (video courtesy of fourth year PhD student Dan Brodkin).

In addition to many current faculty and students, alumni Andrew Hedding (PhD, 2022), Aaron Kaplan (PhD, 2008), and Line Mikkelsen (PhD, 2004) were present. Some other past members of the department were also in attendance, but were not captured photographically, including Vera Gribanova (PhD, 2010) and Boris Harizanov (PhD, 2014).

One person appears in only a couple of these photos, because she was behind the camera, fourth-year PhD student Yaqing Cao.

WCCFL 41 was made possible by the generous support of the Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz and the Department of Linguistics, as well as the tremendous dedication and hard work of many linguistics graduate students and LRC Coordinator Maria Zimmer.

Nguyen accepts psychology position at Illinois State

Allison

Professor Allison Nguyen

Allison Nguyen, an MA student in the department, has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Experimental Psychology at Illinois State University, starting next fall. A PhD student in the Department of Psychology, Allison’s dissertation examines how conversational participants negotiate meaning, including how they explicitly signal entering and exiting the negotiation process using expressions like kinda, as well as how misinformation and hyperpartisanship spread. As an MA student in Linguistics, Allison is also completing a thesis: this aims to unify embedded and unembedded rising declaratives by proposing a strategy-based account.

Congratulations, Professor Nguyen!

Colin Hirschberg receives Dean’s Undergraduate Award

Colin Hirschberg, who received a BA in linguistics in Fall 2022, has been awarded a Dean’s Undergraduate Award for his thesis on “Restrictions on Mandarin bei-passives,” supervised by Professor Jess Law. Only 10 Dean’s Awards, which come with a $100 prize, are made in the Humanities Division each year. 

The WHASC Editor asked Colin to briefly describe what he discovered in his thesis research:

“This thesis examines Mandarin passive sentences, demonstrating that they have an additional requirement not shared with active sentences. Passive verbs must be marked for a change of state, though, this requirement seems to be relaxed when the subject describes a sentient individual, like a human. This work attributes the constraints on passives to a general notion of affectedness. An individual is affected when they undergo a change of state. Sentient individuals can undergo more types of abstract changes of state than non-sentient ones, so despite the ostensibly relaxed affectedness requirement, a passive sentence does express a change of state, just an abstract emotional one rather than a physical one like in. That passive subjects are more constrained by affectedness than the corresponding active objects not only refutes the meaning equivalence between active and passive sentences; this also reaffirms a longstanding observation in linguistics that the subject position is structurally prominent.”

Congratulations, Colin!

Colin Hirschberg

Colin Hirschberg

Chung on YouTube

PulanSpeaks is a Guam-based YouTube-channel devoted to the creating and sharing of video discussions of cultural and political issues affecting Pacific island cultures and communities. It is hosted by Edward Leon Guerrero, who became a cultural and language activist as an undergraduate at the University of Guam. In the most recent installment of PulanSpeaks (April 15th), Guerrero hosted Professor Emerita Sandy Chung in a discussion of her career-long commitment to the study of the Chamorro language (or Chamoru as it is known in Guam), and of the character, origin, and history of the language. They also consider the issues that the language currently faces in the Mariana Islands, and the history of her own involvement with the language and its communities. 

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