Bios of Participants
Peter Alrenga received his Ph.D. from the UCSC Linguistics Department in 2007. His primary interests are in semantics, syntax, and their interface. Specific research topics include the syntax and semantics of comparative constructions, noun phrase semantics (especially in the domains of kinds and amounts), and free choice items. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago (where every day is an alumni reunion), investigating the cross-linguistic expression of comparison and gradability with Chris Kennedy. [website]
Chris Barker (along with John Moore) is the first PhD from the UCSC linguistics department. Barker graduated from Cowell College with a BA in Computer and Information Sciences, and held positions at SRI, OSU, Rochester, and UC San Diego. He is currently Professor of Linguistics at New York University, and is best known for his pioneering work on the topic of being a UCSC semanticist named Chris. [website]
Ryan Bush, Ph.D. (2000) is a Senior User Interface Designer at Nuance Communications, where he designs speech recognition applications for customers such as AT&T and MetroPCS, and specializes in the area of error handling. He is also a fine-art photographer, focusing on revealing the mysteries and the sacred hidden in everyday objects. His photography has been featured in numerous exhibitions in the Bay Area, and he is represented by the Bryant Street Gallery in Palo Alto, and the SFMOMA Artists Gallery. [website]
Christine Gunlogson (Chris III) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Rochester, with a joint appointment in Linguistics and Brain and Cognitive Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from UCSC in 2001. Her primary research interests are in the semantics and pragmatics of sentence type, especially polar interrogatives and questions. Under the influence of UR's interdisciplinary research environment she has also become active in collaborative work in experimental semantics and pragmatics. [website]
Dan Karvonen is currently a senior lecturer in Finnish and linguistics at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He holds a B.A. in Finnish and Russian from the University of Minnesota, an M.A. in linguistics from Indiana University, and received his Ph.D. from UCSC in 2005. His main research interests lie in phonology, with specific interests in word prosody (stress and rhythm), syllable weight, the prosodic structure of compounds and pseudo-compounds, and loanword phonology. The main empirical focus of his research has been on Finnish, which has recently broadened to include other Finno-Ugric languages. [website]
Chris Kennedy was the second Chris to receive a PhD from UCSC, in 1997, and is now Professor and (much to his surprise) Chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. During one of his regular trips down Interstate 5 to Los Angeles, a flash of inspiration (or maybe just a flash from the engine of his 1971 Volvo) led him to begin work on the syntax and semantics of comparatives, which despite initial warnings ("Too hard." --- anonymous UCSC faculty member) turned into his dissertation and formed the basis of much of his subsequent work in syntax, semantics and pragmatics. His most significant utterance during his years at UCSC: "Sure, I can play lead guitar in a surf band...."[website]
Vera Lee-Schoenfeld received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from UCSC in 2005, then spent a year as Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University, and has since been furthering her research and teaching experience as a faculty member in the Linguistics Department at Swarthmore College. Her main research interest is German syntax (infinitive constructions, possessor datives, binding, VP-fronting, and auxiliary selection), but she used to be and is now again involved in a syntax-phonology interface project focusing on third tone patterns in Mandarin Chinese. The next research area she plans to tackle is the agreement morphology of German Sign Language. [website]
Anya Lunden has been at the College of William & Mary in Virginia since graduating from UCSC in 2006 (2008-9 will be her last year there). Her main line of research stems from her dissertation, explaining the phenomenon traditionally accounted for with final consonant extrametricality by linking syllable weight to consistent proportional increases in duration. She is also interested in other right-edge phenomena especially as they shed light on the dual nature of the right edge as both a weak and strong position. [website]
Emily Manetta received her PhD in Linguistics from UCSC in 2006. Her dissertation research focused on wh-movement and wh-expletive constructions in the Indic languages Hindi-Urdu and Kashmiri. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Vermont and continues to research comparative Indic syntax. Emily is also working to develop the new Program in Linguistics at the University of Vermont. [website]
Louise McNally graduated from UCSC in 1992 and is Professor of Linguistics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, where she has taught since 1995. Prior to that she spent two years at Indiana University and another year between OSU and UCSD. She tends to work on topics that involve the interaction of lexical and compositional semantics. Specific topics have included the semantics of noun phrases, especially property-type noun phrases; the semantics of adjectives, including gradability and nominal modification; existential and related constructions; and, to a lesser extent, the integration of work on information packaging into dynamic semantics. When she's not working (and even when she is), she's the mother of two children. [website]
Jason Merchant (Yale BA linguistics 1991, UCSC PhD 1999) is associate professor in the Linguistics Dept at the University of Chicago. His interests are in syntax, semantics, and their interface, especially in the topics of ellipsis, case, voice, agreement, comparatives, and ellipsis. (Did I mention ellipsis?) He has been trying for several years to escape the ellipsis ghetto, but has yet to convince anyone other than his two kids that he thinks about other things, too. His main language areas are the West Germanic languages and Greek, with more recent semi-fieldwork-like forays into Vlach and Aleut. [website]
Line Mikkelsen (Ph.D., Linguistics, UCSC, 2004)'s research interests are the syntax, semantics, and morphology of natural language, and the relations among these. Most of her work has centered on Danish and English. She has worked on noun incorporation, definiteness marking, expletive constructions, relative clauses, and copular constructions (the last is the topic of her dissertation). Most recently she has become interested in verb phrase anaphora, coordination of pronouns, and various kinds of complex DP structures, the latter as part of ongoing joint work with Jorge Hankamer (UCSC) on the morphosyntax of definiteness marking in the Scandinavian languages. She has a long-standing interest in philosophy of language and is affiliated with the UC Berkeley Department of Philosophy. [website]
John Moore (along with Chris Barker) is the first PhD from the UCSC linguistics department, working on Spanish causative and related structures with Judith Aissen, Sandy Chung, and Jim McCloskey. He is a professor (and currently chair) at the UCSD Department of Linguistics. His work has centered around Spanish syntax, Russian syntax (with David Perlmutter), and argument structure (with Farrell Ackerman). He is currently embarking on a project on the Spanish of the San Diego-Tijuana border region. The paper presented here, a quasi-historical account of the language of the Roma in Spain, developed from arguments John has had over the years with fuzzy-brained romanticists in the US flamenco community. [website]
Eric Potsdam (UCSC PhD 1996) is an associate professor in the Linguistics Program at the University of Florida. He is a syntactician and his dissertation research was on the syntax and semantics of the English imperative. He now works on various issues surrounding the clause structure of Austronesian languages, especially Malagasy. Starting in August, Eric will be on temporary assignment to the National Science Foundation as a Linguistics Program Director. [website]
Chris Potts received his BA in Linguistics from NYU in 1999. While at NYU, he was in the philosophy club with Sacha Arnold (2000 UCSC Linguistics MA). They ate Choco Leibniz, worried about arthritis and fake water, endured Paul Postal's red pen, and dreamed of redwoods. In Santa Cruz, Chris lived at 180 Dakota Ave, Apt 21, which has sheltered many UCSC linguists through the years. His advisor was (and is) Geoff Pullum, and Bill Ladusaw and Jim McCloskey were also primary influences. Chris received his PhD in 2003, with a dissertation titled The Logic of Conventional Implicatures. The path to that work took him through model-theoretic syntax, logic symbols, and modal logics for phonology. When these things seemed on the verge of defeating him, he would take to the hills on his bicycle; the roads connecting Rt 9 to Empire Grade are remarkably good for clearing one's mind of linguistics. In 2003, Chris started as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at UMass Amherst, where he has been ever since. At present, he works on expressive content (e.g., swears, honorifics), decision-theoretic models of pragmatics, and computational phonology. [website]
As an undergraduate at MIT, Nathan Sanders majored in mathematics, but also earned a minor in linguistics, the first time such a minor was available at MIT. In 2003, he received his PhD in linguistics from UCSC, where he worked on such topics as the phonology of ludlings, the role of phonetics in phonology, and derivational opacity. He was hired by Williams College right out of graduate school to develop their linguistics program from the ground up. Bringing with him a variety of pedagogical and curricular elements of UCSC's undergraduate linguistics program, Nathan has built a thriving program that, in just five years, has yielded nine undergraduate majors, two honors theses, and award-winning undergraduate research. Though focused primarily on the administrative requirements of starting and running the fledgling Linguistics Program at Williams, Nathan has been recently working closely with Jaye Padgett on phonetic modeling of vowel systems via computer simulation. [website]
Anne Sturgeon graduated from the Ph.D. program in 2006 with a dissertation on the syntax and pragmatics of contrastive topic in Czech. She worked closely with Judith Aissen (advisor), as well as Donka Farkas and Jim McCloskey (committee members). Her dissertation will be coming out as a book soon from John Benjamins publishers, The Left Periphery: The interaction of syntax, pragmatics and prosody in Czech. Since graduating from UCSC she has presented material from her dissertation, as well as new work on the middlefield in Czech at the LSA and FASL (Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics). She has been working in industry since 2006 as a linguist at H5 in San Francisco. She is a discourse analyst there and works mainly on textual analysis and linguistic modeling. She lives in Oakland with her husband and infant son. [website]
Peter Svenonius Peter (B.A., Linguistics and Anthropology, UMass Amherst 1987; Ph.D. UCSC 1994) is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Tromsø, a Senior Researcher at Norway’s Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics (CASTL) , Director of the Nordic Center of Excellence in Nordic Microcomparative Syntax (NORMS), and holder of a Young Excellent Researcher Grant from the Norwegian Research Council, to investigate cross-linguistic expressions of space and motion (in a project called Moving Right Along). Right now he is looking for the cap to his pen, which he thinks might have rolled under the desk. [website]
Adam Ussishkin received his Ph.D. from UCSC in 2000, and was subsequently hired by the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he is currently an associate professor and avid fan of the Sonoran Desert. His graduate career trained him in formal phonology and morphology, with a focus in prosodic morphology and Semitic languages. Since arriving in Arizona, he has pursued research in the psycholinguistic domain, and currently holds an NSF grant investigating lexical access in Hebrew and Maltese. [website]
Rachel Walker is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Southern California, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1998. She completed her Ph.D. in Linguistics at UCSC in 1998 and her masters degree in Linguistics at the University of Toronto in 1993. Professor Walker's research is in the area of phonological theory. Her research focuses chiefly on patterns of long-distance assimilation and copy, as seen in systems of consonant harmony, vowel harmony, and reduplication, and she examines the interaction of these patterns with positions of prosodic prominence, such as stress. In addition to her book, titled Nasalization, Neutral Segments and Opacity Effects, published in 2000. She has published a number of articles in journals including Language, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Phonology, and Language and Cognitive Processes. She is currently writing a book titled Vowel Patterns in Language to be published by Cambridge University Press. [website]
Andy Wedel received his PhD from the UCSC Linguistics Department in 2004. In an earlier life he was a biologist working in molecular evolution and he has carried that general theme forward into his current work in linguistics. In particular, he is interested in the ways in which feedback can influence the development of language patterns. He is currently an assistant professor in the linguistics department at the University of Arizona. [website]
Lynsey Wolter (B.A. Swarthmore 2000, Ph.D. UCSC 2006) is currently an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. After graduating from UCSC she spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester's Center for Language Sciences. Her main research interests are in semantics and pragmatics, and specific research topics have included definiteness, the interpretation of demonstratives, reference resolution, and the nature of identity and identification. [website]