Dave Kush (NTNU-Norway) - Title TBD About eight times each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world. For full information visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html

There are many approaches to modeling lexically-conditioned phonology in current formal theories, including lexically-indexed constraints and cophonologies. Nearly all of these existing approaches assume categorical membership in the lexical classes that condition differential phonotactics or phonological behaviors: for example, a lexical item is either a noun or a verb, or of one gender class or […]

Much work in syntax suggests that there is a strong preference --- given two or more options --- for shorter dependencies over longer dependencies, often referred to as a locality condition. Cases where these conditions are apparently violated are therefore a general topic of interest. This talk presents two case studies of apparent violations of locality in […]

For more information, please see visit the Linguistics Department Website.

Every year towards the end of the winter quarter, the Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference showcases the research of second and third year graduate students. This conference coincides with a visit to campus of prospective graduate students, and it always features as an invited speaker, a PhD alumna or alumnus of the department. This […]

Kathryn Davidson (Harvard) - Title TBD Kathryn Davidson is an assistant professor in Linguistics at Harvard University where her research investigates the unique capacity that we have to understand an infinite number of sentences that we’ve never encountered before (semantics), how we incorporate contextual information into these meanings (pragmatics), and how we ever learn to […]

Kevin Ryan (Harvard) - Title TBD Kevin M. Ryan is a phonologist whose research focuses on prosodic systems and the constituents of speech, especially stress, weight, meter, and phrasal phonology. This work draws on the statistical analysis of speech/text corpora, experiments, and studies of particular languages (often Indic or Dravidian). About eight times each year, […]

Jesse Harris (UCLA) - Title TBD Jesse Harris is an assistant professor at UCLA in the Department of Linguistics, and director of the UCLA Language Processing Lab. His research investigates how language users develop a sufficiently rich linguistic meaning during online comprehension, concentrating in particular on three related areas: (a) the formal semantics of context […]

The Linguistics Department's annual Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) will be held Friday, June 2nd, from 2:00 – 5:00pm in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge & Courtyard. The Distinguished Alumnus speaker will be Caroline Andrews who is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Zurich. We hope you will attend.

Ryan Bennett, UC Santa Cruz: "Vowel deletion as grammatically-controlled gestural overlap in Uspanteko" Uspanteko (Mayan) is spoken by ~5000 people in the central highlands of Guatemala. Unstressed vowels in Uspanteko often delete, though deletion is variable within and across speakers. Deletion appears to be phonological, being sensitive to phonotactics, foot structure, vowel quality, and morphology; […]