Department Colloquia

These are in-person events. For accessibility issues, please contact James Funk.

Spring 2025

Friday, April 25 @ 1:20pm
Room: HUM 1 – 202
Matt Wagers, UC Santa Cruz
Title: Setting healthy (mnemonic) boundaries
Abstract

Friday, May 23 @  1:20pm
Room: HUM 1 – 202
Elena Anagnostopoulou, University of Crete and IMS-FORTH
Title: Rethinking clitics: a view from Greek
Abstract

Winter 2025

Friday, January 31 @ 1:20pm
Room: HUM 2 – 259
Karlos Arregi, University of Chicago
Title: Singular they and the syntax of townhouses
Abstract

Friday, March 7 @  1:20pm
Room: HUM 2 – 259
Jessica Rett, UCLA
Title: Ambidirectionality and apparently expletive negation
Abstract

Fall 2024

Friday, November 8 @ 1:20pm
Room: HUM 1 – 210
Jim McCloskey, UCSC
Title: Clauses without verbs – The Irish landscape and beyond
Abstract

Friday, November 22 @  1:20pm
Room: HUM 1 – 202
Draga Zec, Cornell
Title: Phonology within morphology in BCS: The case of OV augmentation
Abstract

Previous Colloquia

2023 – 2024

Fall 2023

Friday, October 13
Room: HUM 1 – 210
Ryan Bennett, UCSC
Title: Vowel deletion as grammatically-controlled gestural overlap in Uspanteko
Abstract

Friday, October 27 @  1:20pm
Room: HUM 1 – 210
Yael Sharvit, UC Los Angeles
Title: Assessing two theories of clausal complementation
Abstract

Winter 2024

Thursday, February 1 @ 11:40am
Room: HUM 1 – 210
Cynthia Yoonjeong Lee, University of Michigan
Title and Abstract

Tuesday, February 6 @ 11:40am
Room: HUM 1 – 210
Drew McLaughlin, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language
Title and Abstract

Thursday, February 8 @ 11:40am
Room: HUM 1 – 210
Andrea Beltrama, University of Pennsylvania
Title and Abstract

Tuesday, February 13 @ 11:40am
Room: HUM 1 – 210
Anthony Yacovone, Tufts University/Massachusetts General Hospital
Title and Abstract

Tuesday, February 20 @ 11:40am
Room: HUM 1 – 210
Caroline Andrews, University of Zurich
Title and Abstract

Thursday, February 22 @ 11:40am
Room: HUM 1 – 210
Jed Pizarro-Guevara, University of Massachusetts
Title and Abstract

Tuesday, February 27 @ 11:40am
Room: HUM 1 – 210
Dustin Chacón, University of Georgia
Title and Abstract

Spring 2024

Friday, April 5 @1:20pm — CANCELLED
Room: HUM 1 – 210
Karlos Arregi, University of Chicago
Title and Abstract

Friday, May 24 @ 1:20pm — CANCELLED
Room: HUM 1 – 210
Draga Zec, Cornell University
Title and Abstract

2022 – 2023

Fall 2022

Friday, November 18 @  11:20am via Zoom
Kate Stone, University of Potsdam – Germany
Title: Resolving illusions of plausibility: ERP and computational modelling findings

POSTPONED: Friday, December 2 @ 1:20pm
Room: HUM 2 – 359
Argyro Katsika, UC Santa Barbara
Winter 2023

Winter 2023

Friday, January 13 @ 1:20pm
Room: HUM 1 – 202
Uri Mor, UC Berkeley and Ivy Sichel (UC Santa Cruz)
Title: The Double Standard in Modern Hebrew: The Rise of Modern Vernacular Hebrew in the 1940s and 1950s

POSTPONED: Friday, January 20 @ 1:20 pm
Room: HUM 1 – 202
Fernanda Ferreira, UC Davis

Friday, February 24 @ 1:20pm
Room: HUM 2 -259
Junko Ito and Armin Mester, UC Santa Cruz
Title: High tones in Kagoshima Japanese

Friday, March 3 @ 1:20pm
Room: HUM 1 – 202
Rajesh Bhatt, UMass
Title: Honor and Plurality in Hindi-Urdu

Friday, March 17 @ 1:20pm
Room: HUM 1 – 202
Marc Garellek, UC San Diego
Title: Non-modal voicing has either little, or everything, to do with voicing: Evidence from synchrony and diachrony

Spring 2023

Friday, April 14 @ 1:20pm
Room: HUM 1 – 202
Bryan Donaldson, UC Santa Cruz
Title: Clitic position and clause structure in Old Occitan and early Old French

Friday, April 21 @ 1:20pm
Room: HUM 1 – 202
Christian Ruvalcaba, UC Santa Cruz
Title: Part-whole datives and integral predicates in English

Friday, May 12 @ 1:20pm
Room: HUM 1 – 202
Argyro Katsika, UC Santa Barbara
Title: Exploring the trigger of prosodic boundaries: The role of word prosody and phrase-level prominence in marking phrase edges

POSTPONED:  Friday, May 26 @ 1:20pm
Julia Swan, San Jose State University

2021 – 2022

Fall 2021

Friday, October 22 @  1:20pm
Room: HUM 1 – 210
Mark Amengual, UC Santa Cruz
Title: Phonetic interactions in multilingual speech

Friday, October 29 @ 1:20pm
Room: HUM 1 – 210
Josefina Bittar Prieto, UC Santa Cruz
Title: Differential Object Marking and Middle Marking in Guaraní

Friday, November 19 @ 12:00pm via Zoom
Bridget Copley, CNRS Paris
Title: The dark side of causation: inefficacious and shadowy influences

Winter 2022

Friday, March 18 @ 1:20pm via Zoom
Mara Breen, Mt Holyoke College
Title: What is implicit prosody and what is it for?

Spring 2022

Friday, April 1 @ 1:20pm via Zoom
Maria Gouskova, NYU
Title: On the Analytical Necessity of Morpheme Structure Constraints

Friday, April 29 @ 1:20pm
Room: HUM 1 – 202
Nicole Holliday, Univ of Pennsylvania
Title: Sociophonetic Variation and Human Interaction with Digital Voice Assistants

Friday, May 6 @ 1:20pm, via Zoom
Katy Carlson, Morehead State University
Title: Accents, Boundaries, Focus, and Where They Matter Most

Friday, May 27 @ 1:00pm, Hybrid Modality
Room: Stevenson Fireside Lounge
LURC 2022
Guest Speaker: Eric Bakovic (UCSD)

2020 – 2021

Fall 2020

Friday, November 13 @  9:00am
Idan Landau, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev – Israel
Title: A Selectional Criterion for Adjunct Control

Friday, November 20 @ 1:20pm
Donka Farkas, UC Santa Cruz
Title: Canonical and Non-canonical Speech Acts

Friday, December 4 @ 1:20pm
Adrian Staub, University of Massachusetts
Title: Word frequency and predictability effects in reading:  Some outstanding puzzles

Friday, December 11 @ 1:20pm
Rebecca Tollan, University of Delaware
Title: Competing argument privileges in Niuean

Winter 2021

Tuesday, January 26 @ 9:00am
Nicholas Rolle, Leibniz-ZAS
Title: Grammatical Tone Allomorphy and Interface Phonology

Wednesday, February 3 @ 1:30pm
Eric Bakovic, UC San Diego
Title: Assembly required: insights from phonological interaction

Wednesday, February 10 @ 1:30pm
Rachel Walker, USC
Title: Segments Deconstructed

Wednesday, February 17 @ 1:30pm
John Alderete, Simon Fraser University
Title: The phonology of speech errors

Wednesday, February 24 @1:30pm
Mary Paster, Pomona College
Title: Counting and learning bias in phonology

Saturday, March 6
Linguistics at Santa Cruz – LASC 2021

Time: 1:30 – 5:40pm

Spring 2021

Friday, April 2 @ 1:20pm
Ora Matushansky, CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, France)
Title: The case of French places

Thursday, April 9 @ 1:20pm
Kathryn Davidson, Harvard
Title: Dynamic signing space, pronouns, and continuous disambiguation

Friday, April 16 and Saturday, April 17
Spring Research Symposium 2021
Time: TBA

Friday, April 23 @ 9:00am
Michelle Sheehan, Anglia Ruskin University – UK
Title: A new take on fake partial control

Friday, May 21 @ 1:20pm
Roumyana Pancheva, USC
Title: Temporal reference without tense

Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference – LURC 2021
Date: Friday, May 28
Time: 1:20 – 5:00pm

2019 – 2020

Fall 2019

Friday, November 1  –  CANCELLED
Roumyana Pancheva, USC
Title: Temporal interpretation without tense

Friday, November 15 @ 1:20pm , Room: HUM 1-210
Jorge Hankamer, UC Santa Cruz
Title: CP Complements to D

Friday, December 6 @ 1:20pm, Room: HUM 1-210
Dave Kush, NTNU-Norway
Title: Learning about Island Variation in L1 (and L2): Insights from Norwegian

Winter 2020

Friday, January 10  –  CANCELLED
Stephanie Shih, USC
Title: On the nature of lexical categories: considerations from sound symbolism

Thursday, January 23 @ 1:30pm, Room: HUM 1 – 202
Kenyon Branan, National University of Singapore
Title:  Locality and anti-locality: two case studies

Thursday, January 30 @ 1:30pm, Room: HUM 1 – 202
Bronwyn Bjorkman (Queens University, Ontario Canada)
Title:  Realizing Syntax

Thursday, February 6 @ 1:30pm, Room: HUM 1 – 202
Nikos Angelopoulos (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Title:  Complementizers as Probes

Thursday, February 13 @ 1:30pm, Room: HUM 1 – 210
Isabelle Charnavel (Harvard University)
Title:  Disentangling the binding knot: Locality, logophoricity and subjecthood in Picture Noun Anaphors

Saturday, February 29, 2020
Linguistics at Santa Cruz – LASC 2020
Room:  Stevenson Fireside Lounge
Time: 2:00pm – 5:00pm

Spring 2020

Friday, April 3 – CANCELLED
Kathryn Davidson, Harvard
Title: TBA

Thursday, April 10 – ZOOM
Research Seminar Symposium
Time: 11:45am – 4:00pm

Friday, April 17 – CANCELLED
Kevin Ryan, Harvard
Title: TBA

Friday, May 8 @ 1:20pm, Room: HUM 2-259
Jesse Harris, UCLA
Title: TBA

Friday, June 5, 2020 – CANCELLED
Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference – LURC 2020
Room: Stevenson Fireside Lounge
Time: 1:30 – 3:00pm

2018 – 2019

Fall 2018

Friday, October 12 @ 1:20pm
Ur Shlonsky, University of Geneve
Title: Subjects of copular constructions

Friday, November 9 @ 1:20pm
Gabriella Caballero, UC San Diego
Title: The interaction between lexical and grammatical tone in Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara)

Friday, December 7 @ 1:20pm
Gorka Elordieta, University of Basque Country, Spain
Title: Unaccented words, headedness, and prosodic phrasing in Northern Bizkaian Basque

Winter 2019

Monday, January 14, 2019
Room/Time: HUM 2 – 259 @ 2:30pm
Naomi Francis, MIT
Title: 
Even in presupposition denials

Thursday, January 17, 2019
Room/Time: HUM 2 – 259 @ 3:00pm
Jess Law, Rutgers University
Title: Constraints on distributivity

Thursday, January 24, 2019
Room/Time: HUM 2 – 259 @ 3:00pm
Nadine Theiler, University of Amsterdam
Title: 
A unified semantics for additive particles

Monday, February 4, 2019
Room/Time: HUM 2 -259 @ 2:30pm
Emily Clem, UC Berkeley
Title: Cyclicity in Agree: Maximal projections as probes

Thursday, February 7, 2019
Room/Time: HUM 2 -259 @ 2:30pm
Michelle Yuan, University of Chicago
Title: Ergativity as object shift in Inuit: New insights from microvariation

Monday, February 11, 2019
Room/Time: HUM 2 -259 @ 2:30pm
Andrew Murphy, Leipzig University
Title: What can tone tell us about movement? Insights from Asante Twi

Thursday, February 14, 2019
Room/Time: HUM 2 -259 @ 2:30pm
Marta Wierzba, Universität Potsdam
Title: Revisiting prosodic reconstruction

Saturday, March 9, 2019
Linguistics at Santa Cruz
Room:  Stevenson Fireside Lounge
Time: 9:00am – 5:00pm

Spring 2019

Friday, April 19 @ 1:20pm
Charles Yang, University of Pennsylvania
Title: Learnability vs. Grammar

Friday, April 26 @ 1:20pm
Laura McPherson, Dartmouth College
Title: Tonal adaptation across musical modality: A comparison of Sambla vocal music and speech surrogates

Friday, May 10 @ 1:20pm
Sandy Chung, UC Santa Cruz
Title: The ingredients of control in Chamarro

Friday, May 31 @ 1:00 pm
Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference – LURC 2019
Stevenson Fireside Lounge

2017 – 2018

Fall 2017

Friday, October 6 @ 4pm
Ashwini Deo, Ohio State University
Title: Alternative circumstances of evaluation and the ser/estar distinction in Spanish

Friday, October 20 @ 4pm
Judith Aissen, UCSC
Title: Right-edge topics in Tsotsil (Mayan)

Friday, November 17 @ 4pm
Brian Dillon, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Title: Process and representation in morphosyntactic processing: A psychophysical approach using Signal Detection Theory 

Winter 2018

Friday, January 19 @ 1:20pm
Martina Wiltschko, University of British Columbia
Title:  Nominal speech act structure. A personal view.

Friday, February 16 @ 1:20pm
Adam Ussishkin, University of Arizona
Title: Roots, or consonants? On the early role of morphology in lexical access

Friday, March 2 @ 1:30pm
Kristen Syrett, Rutgers University
Title: Experimental evidence for context sensitivity in the nominal domain: What children and adults reveal

Saturday, March 10 from 9:00am – 4:00pm
Linguistics at Santa Cruz – LASC 2018
Room:  Stevenson Fireside Lounge

Spring 2018

Friday, May 4 @ 1:45pm
Liz Coppock, Boston University
Title: Most vs. the most in languages where the more means most

Friday, May 18 @ 1:30pm
Meghan Sumner, Stanford University
Title: Usage-based linguistic models and understanding human behavior

Friday, June 8, 2018 @ 1:00pm
Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference – LURC 2018
Stevenson Fireside Lounge

2016 – 2017

FALL 2016

September 30th 
Itamar Francez, University of Chicago
Title: Semantically impossible adjectives

October 7th 
Akira Omaki, University of Washington
Title: Developing incrementality: Grammar and parsing of wh-dependencies in children

November 18th 
Kie Zuraw, UCLA
Title: The Breadth of the Candidate Set

WINTER 2017

Thursday, January 26th
Shota Momma, UC San Diego
Title: Aligning parsing and generation

Tuesday, January 31st
Hannah Sande, UC Berkeley
Title: Modeling the morphology/phonology interface: Evidence from process morphology in Guébie

Thursday, February 2nd
Dustin Chacon, University of Minnesota
Title: Filling in Gaps in Comparative Syntax

Thursday, February 9th
Juliet Stanton, MIT
Title: Constraints on the Distribution of Nasal-Stop Sequences: An Argument for Contrast

Thursday, February 16th
Elliott Moreton, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
Title: Emergent positional privilege in blend formation

Tuesday, February 21st
Sam Zukoff, MIT
Title: Stress Restricts Reduplication

Thursday, February 23rd
Ryan Bennett, Yale
Title: Idiosyncrasy and contextual variability in the prosody of functional morphemes

Thursday, March 2nd
Amanda Rysling, University of Massachusetts – Amherst
Title: Preferential early attribution in segmental perception

Tuesday, March 5th
Jennifer Smith, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
Title: Unpacking the asymmetries in category-specific phonology

LASC (Linguistics at Santa Cruz) 2017
Saturday, March 18th
Time: 8:30am – 5:00pm
Room: HUM 1 – 210

SPRING 2017

April 14th 
Junko Ito & Armin Mester, UC Santa Cruz
Title: Pitch Accent and Tonal Alignment

May 26th 
Susan Lin, UC Berkeley
Title: Gradience from variation in articulatory magnitude and timing

Friday, June 2nd
LURC (Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference) 2017
Time: 12:45 – 4:45pm
Room: Stevenson Fireside Lounge

2015 – 2016

FALL 2015

October 9th 
Keith Johnson, UC Berkeley
“Adventures in Phonetic Neuroscience”

October 16th in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge
Heidi Harley, University of Arizona
“Suppressing subject arguments in Hiaki”

October 30th
Ivano Caponigro, UC San Diego
“Free-Choice Free Relative Clauses in Italian and Romanian”

November 20th
Elliott Moreton, University of North Carolina
“Implicit and explicit learning of phonotactic patterns”

WINTER 2016 

January 15th
Sharon Inkelas, UC Berkeley
“The A-map model: Articulatory reliability in child-specific phonology”

Thursday, January 28th
Claire Halpert, University of Minnesota
“Surmountable barriers”
Room/Time: HUM 2 – 259 from 2:00-3:30pm

Monday, February 1st
Brooke Larson, University of Iowa
“The What and Whens of Syntactic Relations”
Room/Time: HUM 1 – 210 from 2:00-3:30pm

February 5th
Colin Phillips, University of Maryland
“Speaking, understanding, and the architecture of language”

Saturday, February 6th
SPLAP: Semantics, Pragmatics and LAnguage Philosophy Conference
Time: 9:30am – 5:15pm
Room: HUM 1 – room 202
Speakers: N. Goodman (Stanford) and A. Kehler (UCSD)

Thursday, February 11th
Ivy Sichel, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
“Anatomy of a counterexample – Extraction from relative clauses”
Room/Time: HUM 1 – 210 from 2:00-3:30pm

Tuesday, February 16th (note date change)
Itamar Kastner, NYU
“On the syntactic reflexes of lexical semantics: The case of reflexives”
Room/Time: HUM 1 – 202 from 2:30-4:00pm (note time change)

Monday, February 22nd
Stefan Keine, University of Mass Amherst
“Selective opacity”
Room/Time: HUM 2 – 259 from 2:00-3:30pm

Saturday, March 5th
LASC: Linguistics at Santa Cruz Conference
Time: 9:30am – 5:30pm
Room: Stevenson Fireside Lounge
Speaker: Ryan Bennett (Yale)

SPRING 2016 

April 15th
Sabine Iatridou, MIT
“Fake things here and there; evidence form now and then”

April 29th
Paul Kiparsky, Stanford
“Agent Nouns: The Morphosyntax of Mixed Categories”

May 6, 7, 8
SULA 9: Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas 9

May 20th
Kyle Johnson, University of Massachusetts
“Building a Trace”

Wednesday, June 1
LURC: Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference
Time: 1:00 – 5:00pm
Room: Stevenson Fireside Lounge
Speaker: Shayne Sloggett (University of Massachusetts)

2014 – 2015

FALL 2014

October 17th
Jane Grimshaw, Rutgers University
The use of force in clausal complementation”

December 12th
Adam Albright, MIT
“Testing phonological biases with Artificial Grammar learning experiments”

WINTER 2015

January 16th
Claire Halpert, University of Minnesota
“Raising: the stakes”

January 23rd
Valentine Hacquard, Maryland
“Bootstrapping into Attitudes”

February 6th
Rachel Walker, USC
“Partially Overlapping Harmonies: Implications for Agreement by Correspondence”

Saturday, March 14th
LASC: Linguistics at Santa Cruz Conference

Time: 8:00 am – 5:00 pm

Room: Stevenson Fireside Lounge
Vera Gribanova, Stanford
Title: “Head movement, ellipsis, and Russian polarity focus”

SPRING 2015

April 10th
Daniel Lassiter, Stanford
“Nested and informative epistemics in a graphical models framework”

April 17th
Cancelled

May 1st
Grant Goodall, UC San Diego
Grammar and working memory: How experimental syntax can help us tell the difference

May 29th
LURC: Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference
Room: Stevenson Fireside Lounge
Time: 12:45 – 4:45 pm

2013 – 2014

October 4th
Jim McCloskey, UC Santa Cruz
“Preverbs, Phases, and Objecthood: An Irish Perspective on Some Old Problems”

November 8th
Anna Szabolcsi, New York University
“What do quantifier particles do?”

November 14th
Seth Yalcin, UC Berkeley
“Epistemic Modality De Re”

January 17th
Lisa Pearl, UC Irvine
More learnable than thou? Testing knowledge representations with realistic acquisition data”

January 24th
Annie Gagliardi, Harvard University
“Grammar-parser tension in language acquisition: Evidence from Q’anjob’al relative clauses”

January 31st
Kathryn Pruitt, Arizona State University
“Culminativity in Harmonic Serialism”

March 15th
LASC: Linguistics at Santa Cruz Conference

Room: Stevenson Fireside Lounge
Guest Speaker: Ruth Kramer, Georgetown University
Topic: “A New Approach to the Morphosyntax of Gender”

April 11th
Sun-Ah Jun, UC Los Angeles
“Prominence and phrasing in ambiguity resolution: Evidence from priming and individual differences”

April 18th
Julie Legate, University of Pennsylvania
“Noncanonical Passives”

May 2nd
Michela Ippolito, University of Toronto
“Negative Conditionals”

May 9th
Jean Fox Tree, UC Santa Cruz
“Spontaneous Communication”

May 30th
LURC: Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference

2012 – 2013

October 5th
Jakub Dotlačil, Visiting Research Professor, UC Santa Cruz
“Distributivity: Its Sources and Incremental Interpretation

October 12th
Roger Levy, UC San Diego
“Probabilistic knowledge and locality in syntactic comprehension”

November 2nd
Ben Munson, University of Minnesota
“Perceived gender and fricative identification”

November 16th
Andries Coetzee, University of Michigan
“A lexical route to voicing co-occurrence restrictions: the case of Afrikaans”

November 30th
Chris Kennedy, University of Chicago 
“Incremental Theme: “Measuring out” is measuring change”

January 24th
Michael Diercks, Pomona College 
“The Great Escape: Raising out of finite clauses in Bantu languages”

January 31st
Martin Walkow, UCLA
“(Conjunct) Agreement between Syntax and PF”

February 7th
Maziar Toosarvandani, MIT
“Gapping is VP-ellipsis”

February 21st
Joseph Sabbagh, UT Arlington 
“Specificity and Objecthood in Tagalog”

April 5th
Jesse Harris, Pomona College
“Generating Alternatives on Demand”

April 12th
Karlos Arregi, University of Chicago 
“Markedness and Rule Generalization in Basque Clitic Morphology”

May 17th
Grant McGuire, UC Santa Cruz 
“Separating voice prototypicality and stereotypicality”
UCSC Institute for Humanities Research Faculty Fellow Talk

2011 – 2012

Fall 2011

Pranav Anand, Assistant Professor, Linguistics Department, UC Santa Cruz
“Assessing the pragmatics of experiments: The case of scalar implicature”

Hagit Borer, Professor of Linguistics, University of Southern California
“In the Event of a Nominal”

Larry Horn, Professor of Linguistics, Yale University
“On the Contrary: Pragmatic Strengthening and Disjunctive Syllogism”

Karen Jesney, Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, USC
“The Interaction of Markedness Factors in Child Consonant Cluster Acquisition”

Winter 2012

Masaya Yoshida, Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University 
“The real-time processing of Forward and Backward Sluicing”

Matthew Gordon, Professor of Linguistics, UC Santa Barbara
“Lexical and post-lexical accentology, morphology, and weight in Muskogean: Case studies from Koasati and Chickasaw”

Spring 2012

Gabriela Caballero, Assistant Professor, Linguistics, UC San Diego
“Stress and tone in Choguita Raramuri (Tarahumara) word prosody”

Lisa Davidson, Associate Professor of Linguistics, New York University
“An investigation of hiatus (non-)resolution in American English”

Hotze Rullmann, Associate Professor, Linguistics, University of British Columbia
“Epistemic Modality in the Scope of Past Tense”

Last modified: Jun 18, 2025