Pre-summer update

Hello USCLinguists! We come to you with a pre-summer update, full of late-breaking news and congratulations! 📰📰👏Now, back to our previously scheduled relaxation…😎🏖️✨

Congratulations 👏

Many congratulations to all of our graduating seniors!  We wish you all much success and happiness in the upcoming years!

Audrey Joachim (Linguistics/Anthropology) Maria Leyva-Hernandez (Linguistics) Ameen Qureshi (Computational Linguistics) Summer Schulte (Computational Linguistics) Meona Khetrapal (Computational Linguistics) Z Luo (Computational Linguistics) Rimi Bhradwal (Computational Linguistics) Susan Nyirenda (Computational Linguistics) Louis Wang (Computational Linguistics) Brian Winn (Computational Linguistics) Daniela Castanon (Linguistics/Cognitive Science) Seoyoon Hong (Linguistics/Cognitive Science) Cindy Gu (Linguistics) Phia McCarthy (Linguistics)

Left to right: Maria Leyva-Hernandez (Ling); Ameen Qureshi (CompLing); Audrey Joachim (Ling; Anthro); Susan Nyirenda (CompLing).

Promotions 💼🎉

Congratulations to faculty member Sandy Disner, who has been promoted to Full Professor!

Look Who’s Talking 🗣

• Faculty member Andrew Simpson was an invited speaker at the UC Berkeley Syntax and Semantics Circle on April 25^th.  Talk: Obligatory object shift in Chinese: aspect, definiteness, and affectedness.

• Faculty member Zuzanna Fuchs was a keynote speaker at the conference on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 34 (FASL 34) on May 18th. Talk title: Polish animate accusative: What eye-tracking reveals about semantic and grammatical animacy agreement.

• Faculty member Travis Major presented solo and also joint work with faculty member Zuzanna Fuchs, Justine Mukhwana Sikuku, and USC undergraduate Catherine Pan at the Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 56), held at the University of Minnesota, May 15-17.  Title of joint presentation: New tools for preparing experimental work: a crowdsourced lexical corpus of Lubukusu.

• Faculty member Elsi Kaiser gave an invited keynote talk at the EPITHETS & STAL-2025 Workshop which was held in  Genoa, Italy on May 7th-8th 2025. Her talk was titled Effects of Valence on Perspective Taking: Experimental Investigations of Epithets and Emoji.

• Faculty member Canaan Breiss gave a talk at the 31^st Manchester Phonology Meeting, held in Manchester, UK. The talk, which is collaborative work with Hiro Katsuda (U. Kanses) and Shigeto Kawahara (Keio U.), was titled Variation and breakdown in the saltatory interaction of Rendaku and velar nasalization.

Other good news 🎉

The Department held an end-of-year dinner for faculty, grad students and undergraduates, which was also a surprise celebration of faculty member Andrew Simpson’s 10 years as chair of the Department of Linguistics.  The Department will welcome a new chair in August, Elsi Kaiser.

Faculty member Andrew Simpson and grad students + four furry friends went hiking on the Gabrielino Trail, now open again, on May 17^th.