News

Chloe Brotherton and Tyler Kline, two students in the PhD program in linguistics, have been awarded a prestigious Professors for the Future fellowship.

https://grad.ucdavis.edu/news/gradpathways-institute-names-2021-2022-professors-future-fellows

This is a great recognition for the potential our students show as future members of the academic profession. Congratulations Chloe and Tyler!

Congratulations to Prof. Robert Bayley on being elected a member of the 2022 class of LSA fellows. This is one of the highest honors bestowed on the members of our profession by the Linguistic Society of America, and a clear recognition of Prof. Bayley's contributions to the discipline. 

https://www.linguisticsociety.org/news/2021/08/17/lsa-elects-2022-class…

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:

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!

Postdoctoral Researcher Michelle Cohn and Associate Professor Georgia Zellou had their work at the UC Davis Phonetics Lab featured in an episode of the UC Davis Unfold podcast. In the episode, Dr. Cohn and Prof. Zellou talk about their work on how technology is changing the way we speak.

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).

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?

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. 

Event Logistics: 3pm in Kerr 273 on November 27th

Speaker Biographies: Dr. Iryna Karamysheva is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Lviv Polytechnic National University in Ukraine, as well as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at UC Davis Linguistics department.

Congratulations to Dr. Bob Bayley (UC Davis) and Dr. Erica J. Benson (University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire) for publishing "Needed Research in North American Dialects"! Click the link below for more information.

Link: https://www.dukeupress.edu/needed-research-in-north-american-dialects