Join the Linguistics Department for Ethan Poole's talk “Syntactic Variables and Semantic Minimality” in collaboration with Zahra Mirrazi. In this talk, Poole argues that when two syntactic variables are "related" and stand in a c- command relationship at LF, a 3⁄4-pattern emerges: free/free, bound/bound, bound/free, and *free/bound. Several otherwise-disparate puzzles are shown to fall under […]

The History of Consciousness department invites you to the next talk in their Winter 2026 Research Colloquium series. This talk examines Tomba’s Revolution and Restoration as an expression of his philosophy of political time. Tomba argues that modernity consists of dynamic and overlapping temporal layers and that revolutionary change occurs when oppressed groups draw on […]

Join the Linguistics Department for Liv Hoversten's talk "Is Language Control in Comprehension Applied Within or External to the Lexicon?" Bilinguals need to continually monitor and select the appropriate language(s) for the current context in order to communicate efficiently. Prominent models of bilingual word recognition posit that this selection process, known as language control, occurs […]

Join the Linguistics Department for Elsi Kaiser's talk, "Do Birds of a Feather Flock Together? Exploring Interpretation and Dissimilation of Third Person Pronouns in English and Finnish". Transitive clauses with two personal pronouns in coargument position (e.g. “she saw her”, “he helped him”) are perfectly natural in English. But perhaps surprisingly, such two-pronoun sequences are […]

The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present Elena Anagnostopoulou (University of Crete and IMS-FORTH), speaking on Rethinking Clitics: A View From Greek. This is an in-person event. You can also join virtually via Zoom. In this talk, Elena Anagnostopoulou will revisit the relationship between clitic doubling and object agreement in connection to the syntax […]

UCSC Linguistics is hosting BayPhon, a workshop on Phonetics and Phonology, on Saturday, May 10, 2025. BayPhon brings together faculty and students from linguistics departments in the region, including Stanford, UC Berkeley, San José State, and UCSC. BayPhon is part of a tradition known as “Phrend” (and before that, “Trend”), where linguistics departments in the broader […]

UCSC Feminist Studies and the UCSC Music Department proudly present Tricia Rose—an internationally respected speaker, award-winning writer, and leading scholar of African American culture, racial inequality, and gender—for a conversation about her book Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives – And How We Break Free. On May 2nd, UCSC Feminist Studies and the UCSC […]

The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present Matt Wagers, speaking on Setting Healthy (mnemonic) Boundaries. This is an in-person event. You can also join virtually via Zoom. 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. […]