News

Latest News

Georgia Zellou Becomes a UC Davis Chancellor's Fellow

Congratulations to Dr. Georgia Zellou for becoming a UC Davis Chancellor's Fellow! "Chancellor’s Fellow" is a title given to early career academics doing exemplary work. Recipients carry the title for five years and are awarded $25,000 in unrestricted philanthropic support for research or other scholarly work.

Sophia Minnillo Wins Graduate Student Award from the American Association for Applied Linguistics

Congrats to Sophia Minnillo (Linguistics PhD student, advisor: Sánchez-Gutiérrez) for receiving the Graduate Student Award from the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL)! This competitive, merit-based award supports the attendance of AAAL graduate student members at the annual conference, which will take place this March in Houston, Texas.

Click the link below to learn more about the award:

https://www.aaal.org/graduate-student-award

Jeremy Rud Wins Elizabeth Pine Dayton Award

Congrats to Jeremy Rud (Linguistics PhD student, advisor: Ramanathan) for receiving the Elizabeth Pine Dayton Award! This competitive travel award enables qualified graduate students interested in pursuing topics in sociolinguistics to attend the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting in January 2024. 

Fall 2023 Colloquium - Bob Bayley and Xinye Zhang - Subject Pronoun Expression: A Cross-Linguistic Variationist Sociolinguistic Study

Abstract: Variation between null and overt subject pronouns, or subject pronoun expression (SPE) (e.g. yo/Ø canto; wo xiang) has been widely studied, attracting the attention of linguists working from multiple perspectives. However, despite decades of research, many questions remain unanswered. For example, which constraints are common across all languages, and which are features of particular languages? Why do rates of SPE differ so widely across languages and even between varieties of the same language?

Fall 2023 Colloquium - Gašper Beguš - AI Interpretability for Biological and Artificial Neural Processing of Language

Abstract: Interpretability is the new frontier in AI research. Understanding how generative models learn and how they resemble or differ from humans can bring insights for diverse fields such as neuroscience and decoding animal communication. In this talk, I present several techniques for introspecting deep neural networks. I also propose a model called ciwaGAN that features several aspects of human language acquisition that other models lack (embodiment, communicative intent, production-perception loop).

Sophia Minnillo Receives Professors for the Future Fellowship

Sophia Minnillo (Linguistics PhD student, advisor: Sánchez-Gutiérrez) has been awarded a prestigious Professors for the Future (PFTF) fellowship! The PFTF program at UC Davis is "a year-long competitive fellowship program designed to develop the leadership skills of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars who have demonstrated their commitment to professionalism, integrity, and academic service". 

Click the link below to learn more. Congratulations, Sophia!

Nicole Dodd Wins NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant

Congrats to Nicole Dodd (Linguistics PhD student, advisor: Morgan) for receiving a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant for her work on "Expectations and Noisy-Channel Processing of Relative Clauses in a verb-initial language (co-PIs: Morgan, Ferreira)! The grant is worth $18,550 and will last from March 2023 to approximately February 2025. Click the link below for more information: