Faculty · Graduate Students · Research Associates
See a list of current faculty affiliated with the Linguistics Department at UC Santa Cruz here.
is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the current Director of Graduate Studies. Her research interests include morphosyntax of the Mayan languages, voice, prominence, and Optimality Theory. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Harvard University in 1974. Recent publications include “Differential Object Marking: Iconicity vs. Economy” and “Markedness and Subject Choice in Optimality Theory,” both in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory; and “Agent Focus and Inverse in Tzotzil,” in Language. [website]
received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from MIT in 2006 with a dissertation focused on the cross-linguistic variation in de se constructions. Later that year, he swapped the white sands of Cambridgeport for the bustle of Santa Cruz. His theoretical work continues to focus on matters of context and perspective, recently advancing into dream reports, quotation, and disagreement. You may find him wandering about the UCSC stacks, attempting to determine where he is.
completed his Ph.D. at Rutgers University in 2007 and he is currently Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interests include semantics, pragmatics, Romance and Balkan languages, philosophical logic and the formal foundations of Optimality Theory. His work investigates anaphoric and quantificational parallels across domains (e.g., quantificational and modal subordination), ways of integrating different semantic and pragmatic frameworks (e.g., various strands of Montagovian and dynamic semantics), the interpretation of plurality, the cross-linguistic semantics and syntax of various constructions (e.g., measure expressions, correlatives and "same" / "different" in quantificational contexts), and the logic of ranking arguments in Optimality Theory. [website]
is now Professor of Linguistics and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor at UCSC. She continues to investigate the syntax of Austronesian languages, particularly Chamorro, Indonesian, and Maori. But her research is currently focused on the syntax-semantics interface, the basic documentation of the Chamorro language, and—farther afield--the prosody of Emily Dickinson’s verse. Two recent publications, both with Bill Ladusaw: Restriction and Saturation (MIT Press) and ‘Chamorro Evidence for Compositional Asymmetry’ (in Natural Language Semantics). [website]
is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Prior to joining UCSC in 1991 she taught at Penn State and at Yale. She received her Ph.D. from The University of Chicago in 1981. She works in formal semantics and pragmatics, focusing on problems in NP semantics and mood and modality. She often draws on data from Romance languages (Romanian in particular) and Hungarian. Recent representative publications include The Semantics of Incorporation (with Henriette de Swart), CSLI, 2003, ‘Specificity distinctions’, in Journal of Semantics, ‘Article choice in plural generics’ (with Henriette de Swart), in Lingua, and ‘Free choice in Romanian’, in Drawing the Boundaries of Meaning, John Benjamins. [website]
is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Director of the Institute for Humanities Research. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Yale University in 1971 and taught at Harvard University before coming to UCSC in 1980. His research interests include syntax, morphology, computational linguistics, and Turkish. Recent publications include "When movement must be blocked: a reply to Embick and Noyer" (Linguistic Inquiry), "Definiteness marking and the structure of Danish pseudopartitives" (Journal of Linguistics) (both coauthored with Line Mikkelsen), and "Why there are two ki's in Turkish" (Current Research in Turkish Linguistics, Eastern Mediterranean University Press). [website]
is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the current director of the Linguistics Research Center. She received her Ph.D. from UMass, Amherst in 1986. Her early work deals with the principles of syllabification and their interaction with phonological and morphological processes: "A Prosodic Theory of Epenthesis," Natural Language and Linguistics Theory 7 (1989). More recently, she has worked on several research projects within the Optimality-Theoretic framework that focus on the structure of the phonological lexicon and the prosodic morphology of Japanese. Selected publications include (with Armin Mester): "The Structure of the Phonological Lexicon", in N. Tsujimura ed. The Handbook of Japanese Linguistics, Blackwell Publishers (1999), Japanese Morphophonemics, LI Monograph Series 41, MIT Press (2003). [website]
is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research in semantics has focused on the syntax-semantics interface and composition, with particular attention to negation. He is co-author, with Geoffrey K. Pullum, of Phonetic Symbol Guide (University of Chicago Press) and, with Sandra Chung, of Restriction and Saturation (MIT Press). He previously taught at the University of Iowa, UCLA, and the University of Connecticut. Most recently he has worked on topics in ellipsis (with Chung and McCloskey), and pragmatic bias. He formerly served as the Provost of UCSC's Cowell College and currently serves as the Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Education. [website]
is affiliated with the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he has been since 1989 and is currently serving as Chair. Before moving to California, he worked in the Department of (Modern) Irish at University College Dublin and held visiting appointments at MIT and at UC San Diego. He works on theoretical syntax and the syntax of Irish, as well as on a variety of issues at the syntax-semantics interface. He also has a strong interest in the theoretical investigation of non-standard varieties of English. Representative recent publications include “Working on Irish,” GLOT 7.3; “Resumption, Successive Cyclicity, and the Locality of Operations,” in Derivation and Explanation (Blackwell); “On the Distribution of Subject Properties in Irish,” in Objects and Other Subjects (Kluwer); “The Morphosyntax of WH-extraction in Irish,” in Journal of Linguistics; and “Quantifier Float and Wh-Movement in an Irish English,” in Linguistic Inquiry. [website]
is Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics. He primarily studies perception as it relates to phonetics and phonology. His current research is aimed at perceptual learning, phonetic categorization and language specific perception. Grant McGuire has been tackling these issues through training and discrimination experiments. Previously, he has looked into interdental fricative substitution, and he is generally interested in perception and laboratory phonology. [website]
received his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1986 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is currently Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research is concerned with the principles that underlie the prosodic organization of human language, as manifested in systems of syllabification, stress, and accent, as well as in the canonical prosodic forms and other templates often encountered in word formation processes. He is pursuing this work in the context of Optimality Theory, with an additional interest in the basic architecture of the theory (parallelism, opacity). His analytical work includes studies of Classical Latin, German and Japanese phonology: "The Quantitative Trochee in Latin" NLLT 12 (1994); "On the sources of opacity in OT: coda processes in German" [with Junko Ito], in C. Féry and R. v.d. Vijver (eds.) The Syllable in Optimality Theory. Cambridge University Press (2003); Japanese Morphophonemics [with Junko Ito], LI Monograph Series 41, MIT Press (2003). [website]
received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1991. He taught at Yale for one year before being hired at UCSC. His research centers on phonology and phonetics. In recent years he has been exploring the ways in which perceptual constraints shape phonological patterns. His main language interest is Russian. Recent publications include “Adaptive dispersion theory and phonological vowel reduction in Russian” (with Marija Tabain) in Phonetica, “The evolution of sibilants in Polish and Russian” (with Marzena Żygis), in the Journal of Slavic Linguistics, and “Contrast, comparison sets, and the perceptual space” (with Máire Ní Chiosáin), to appear in Phonological Argumentation: Essays on Evidence and Motivation (Equinox, Steve Parker, ed.). [website]
is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on the interface between memory and syntax, and how compositional representations are encoded and used in real-time. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Maryland in 2008. Most recently he has conducted work on subject-verb agreement, wh-dependencies, and the conditions under which comprehension is faithful to grammatical restrictions. Matt spent 2008-2009, working with Professor Brian McElree (Department of Psychology, New York University) on a project investigating the scope of syntactic information that can be represented in the limited-capacity focus of attention. He has been in Santa Cruz full-time since 2009. [website]