Professor Rachel Walker joins the Linguistics Department

July 01, 2021

We are delighted to announce that Rachel Walker has joined our department as Professor. The author of Nasalization, Neutral Segments and Opacity Effects (2000, Garland) and Vowel Patterns in Language (2011, Cambridge), Walker is a renowned theoretical phonologist, with central contributions on opacity and serialism, segmental representation, positional prominence, and the nature of long-distance processes. More recently, she has pursued collaborative work on the phonetics and phonology of liquids and on the phonology of Ladin, a minority Romance language spoken in the Dolomites around the Sella Massif in Northern Italy. Walker is a 1998 graduate from the UC Santa Cruz Linguistics Department, and, in a form of action at a distance, has been a mentor to many graduates from our program over the ensuing years. We are pleased to welcome her home and look forward to the many contributions this prominent scholar and teacher will make in her new position.