Recent Linguistics News

Dr. Alex Warstadt joins the faculty

Grad student Maxine Van Doren accepts Assistant Professorship at CSUSB

Grad student Shai Nielson receives NSF grant

Alumna Dr. Hope Morgan earns €1.5 million grant from the European Research Council

Grad student Shai Nielson receives NIH fellowship

Undergraduate student Mia Khattar earns HDSI Scholarship

Our very own undergraduate student Mia Khattar has earned a Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute Undergraduate Scholarship! The Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI) Undergraduate Scholarship Program supports multidisciplinary student-led projects. Unlike lab-directed projects, students will be able to choose their own research topics and lead the research process. Scholarships will provide opportunities for students to work closely with a mentor to develop analytical skills, develop data science portfolios, and foster novel data-driven approaches to problem solving.

Mia will be using the award to fund research of her honors thesis on human and computer detection and perception of AI voices. Her thesis will be supervised by Will Styler, Associate Teaching Professor and Director of the Computational Social Sciences Program. Mia had the following to say about recieving the award, "I am honored to receive this award and to be recognized by the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute."

Congratulations Mia!

Grad Student Rachel Miles receives NIH Fellowship

Grad Student Ray Huaute awarded UC President's Postdoctoral Fellowship

We are proud to announce that our graduate student Ray Huaute has been awarded one of 35 University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowships out of more than 800 applicants! During his postdoc, Ray will be producing a manuscript for a new pedagogical grammar for Cahuilla, one of several critically endangered Indigenous languages of Southern California.

Ray had this to say, "Being part of the Linguistics Department at UC San Diego has helped me grow tremendously as both an academic and a linguist. In the department we have amazing faculty who are both well known and well versed in their respective fields of specialization, as well as incredibly helpful staff members who have been recognized for their work by the university."

Professor Gabriela Caballero, Ray's advisor, added the following, "Ray's work is incredibly important for our discipline, as it expands the documentation of TMD Cahuilla within its broader social and historical context and develops novel linguistic analyses of this language, which features highly complex linguistic structures in the domains of phonology and morphology."

More information on Ray's fellowship can be found here: https://ppfp.ucop.edu/.../fellows.../huaute-incamu-ray.html

Celebrating our 2022-2023 graduates

At the end of this 2022 to 2023 school year, we’d like to celebrate our graduating students. Among them, seven graduating Ph.D. students. Their outstanding scholarship and enthusiasm have contributed enormously to our department. In chronological order of defense date, their names and dissertation titles are:

• Anna Mai (not pictured): “Contrast, Neutralization, and Systems of Invariance”
• Yuan Chai: “Phonetics and Phonology of Checked Phonation, Syllable, and Tone”
• Yaqian Huang (not pictured): “Phonetics of Period Doubling”
• Neşe Demir Nalcı: “Laz Turkish: A Case Study of Partially Productive Vowel Harmony and Sociolinguistic Attitudes”
• Emily Davis: “The Nature and Evolution of Center-Embedding: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach”
• Tory Sampson: “Grammaticalization in American Sign Language: The Case of Nonverbal Predication”
• Alejandro Rodriguez: TBD (defending Summer 2023)

We’re also saying goodbye to many graduating seniors who are receiving B.A.’s in Linguistics. This year, we gave our department’s “Outstanding Senior Award” to three undergraduates whose excellence in academics and contributions to the department set them apart from other graduates in their class. They were:

• Alex Meng
• Khanh Nguyen
• Tiffany Wu

Congratulations to all our graduating students! Stay connected to us so we can celebrate all the amazing things you’ll do in your lives and careers. Don’t forget to join the UC San Diego Alumni Network for networking opportunities with your fellow Tritons. Good luck with all of your future endeavors, enjoy your summer, and most of all, don’t forget to shock ‘em, Tritons!

Prof. Marc Garellek wins 2023 Legacy Lecture Award

Leon Bergen & Will Styler gain tenure

Gabriela Caballero promoted to Professor

Graduate Student, Tory Sampson, heading to Boston University

We are happy and proud to share the great news that our graduate student Tory Sampson just accepted a postdoctoral position at Boston University's Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences Department. Tory will be working primarily with Dr. Amy Lieberman and Dr. Naomi Caselli in studying the relationship between cognition, iconicity and movement properties in sign language in the classification of syntactic categories using eye-tracking methodologies. Tory's new position starts this Summer as soon as she defends her Ph.D. thesis on the grammaticalization of a certain sign resulting in a copula in American Sign Language under the supervision of Prof. Rachel Mayberry.

Ph.D. Candidate, Maxine Van Doren, launches SLP post-bacc blog

Linguistics Exemplary Staff Award Recipients

Christina Knerr Frink, our Chief Administrative Officer and Jeffrey Lau, our Academic HR Analyst, have both been selected for the 2021- 2022 Exemplary Staff Employee of the Year Award! This highly selective award was granted to only 15 of the 130 nominees this year. No other two staff members of the same department have been awarded and our department only has 6 staff members! This award honors staff members that have made, “exceptional contributions to the UC San Diego and San Diego communities in support of the vision to be a ‘student-centered, research-focused, service-oriented public university.’” The outpouring of appreciation from the faculty and fellow staff shows that they not only deserve this award but are also a pleasure to work with. Our warmest and proudest congratulations to Christina and Jeffrey!

If you want to know more about how they became the superstars they are, we prepared brief bio sketches of Christina and Jeffery. We also asked them to share how they feel about this award.

Christina is the Chief Administrative Officer that serves the Department of Linguistics, the Linguistics Language Program (LLP), the Heritage Language Program (HLP) and the Human Developmental Sciences Program (HDS). She started working at UC San Diego as an undergraduate student assistant for the Human Developmental Sciences Program and was hired following graduation into the Field Research Coordinator position where she had the opportunity to grow and learn through mentorship from Gris Arellano, Alia Welch Partida & Clarissa Reese. She received a promotional opportunity to serve as the lead academic advisor for the International Studies Program where she had the opportunity to learn to lead a Program with mentorship from Nancy Gilson. During this time she also had the formative experience of serving on the leadership board for the Organization for Department and Program Advisors (ODaPA) alongside Jennifer Beauchamp and Laura Majoch. In 2015 she was hired as the Student Affairs Manager for the Linguistics Department, LLP, HLP and Human Developmental Sciences Program and dove in learning the needs of the Department and Programs and finding best ways to support our community members. In 2018, she was promoted to Chief Administrative Officer and has been lucky to have such great support from everyone in the Department, Programs and the School of Social Sciences.

In response to receiving this award, Christina said the following:

If I had two words to describe my response to winning this award it would be (1) shocked (particularly because I was advocating so strongly for Jeffrey Lau to win the award!) and (2) overwhelmingly honored (okay, that's more than two words). I might have teared up when Eric shared the news. Just being nominated for this award is so very meaningful to me, and I want to sincerely thank everyone that took the time to submit a nomination. I appreciate you all and am so very thankful that I get to work with you. There are so many wonderful people that have supported me, but I would like to thank Linguistics Department Chair Eric Bakovic and Assistant Dean for the School of Social Sciences Nieves Rankin and my team past and present (Jeffrey (who also won the award this year!), Alia, Rachel, Alycia, Rula, Lily, Olivier, Mariko, Erica, Camie, Cheri and Lucie) because I would not have been able to do this without any of you. And now this really sounds like a sappy awards ceremony quote, so I will end it there! Thank you!

Jeffrey has been overseeing academic personnel for Linguistics and HDS since 2018. He was one of the principal architects who secured a grant to fund the new monitors on the 3rd and fourth floors. In addition to his regular duties, Jeffrey's been filling in as the department's fiscal and travel assistant ever since Lucie Wiseman retired and recently completed assignments in Anthropology (academic personnel) and Psychology (student payroll) during staff vacancies.  He also represented the School as the HR SME for the campus Enterprise Renewal Systems Identity Management workgroup and became a member of the EVC AA HR Advisory Group. 

Jeffrey told us:

I was deeply touched upon learning of the award. Not so much about the award itself, but the fact that people made the time to submit a nomination. This award is really a reflection on them and the school's sense of community.

On Thursday August 25^th from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., there will be an awards ceremony to celebrate their achievements. They, along with 13 other recipients, will be honored. Nominators and fellow recipients and will be invited. Congratulations, Christina and Jeffrey!

LSA - Meet the Authors

The LSA July edition of Meet the Authors webinar featured authors Tory Sampson and Rachel Mayberry, authors of “An Emerging SELF: The Copula Cycle in American Sign Language." 

 Watch the webinar.

Will Styler to give UC San Diego Legacy Lecture

Linguistics Professor Will Styler has been chosen by campus-wide student vote to give the 2022 UC San Diego Legacy Lecture. This lecture series, which was started in 2015 by the UC San Diego Scholars Society, is an annual spring-quarter event that allows one UC San Diego professor to address the student body with a unique lecture with the theme: "If this were the last lecture you ever gave, what would you want to tell the world?"

Will told us: "This is, to my mind, among the highest honors I could receive, because it comes from my students, the people best suited to appreciate the work I put into my craft as a teacher. It's wonderful when students enjoy my classes or say nice things on CAPEs, but here, they went out of their way, on their own time, to recognize my teaching, share that appreciation at the campus level, and vote me past great teachers from much larger departments. That's absolutely amazing to me, and I will always be grateful to the students who put in the time and effort to make this happen, and I will honor their hard work by bringing my characteristic combination of passion, energy, bad jokes, and 'lightly outdated' memes to this lecture, and by sharing the joys of linguistics and language with the greater UC San Diego community."

Will's students love him. Here are some of their comments.

"Probably the most engaging professor I've had ... He's so passionate about his topic and makes his lectures unique and fun."

"The absolute most unhinged professor, but in a good way. Loves his job and loves linguistics."

"He's a very engaging and student oriented professor. ... His lectures have definitely changed my outlook on my career."

Visit Will's website: wstyler.ucsd.edu

Annual Conference on African Linguistics 53

Changemaker Fellowships in Anti-Racist Pedagogy

Are you thinking of pursuing a career as a Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP)?

Watch the session:

https://youtu.be/mZMIeJ4eFVE

Prof. Ignatius Nip of SDSU’s School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences joined us to discuss the admissions process at SDSU, how students with Linguistics backgrounds can prepare for SLP programs, and to address questions. Dr. Nip is the current Interim Chair of SDSU's program, and has served as the admissions advisor for SDSU’s SLP Master’s program, so he’s the ideal person to speak with if you have any questions about the admissions process.

A panel of UCSD alums answer your questions and give advice!

Marc Garellek promoted to Professor

$400K NSF grant awarded

Ivano Caponigro has a new book out

Our graduate students, faculty, and alumni present at CUNY

New Field Research Mentorship Program for linguistics majors

Michelle Yuan co-organizes WSCLA 25

Kati Hout accepts position at LinkedIn!