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Welcome to new grad students in 2016-2017!

We are pleased to announce that five new graduate students will be joining the department!
Please join us in welcoming them!

Emily Davis

(CSU Fullerton)

My linguistics studies have been quite varied— color terms, Internet linguistics, syntactic typology, and lexical elaboration are among the topics I have worked on at CSUF. However, I am particularly interested in the questions surrounding human language evolution: what form did protolanguage take, and why did it evolve?  More specifically, I am interested in linguistic recursion and its possible evolutionary origins, as well as its precedents or parallels in animal communication and cognition—especially among birds.

Laura Kelly

(UC Davis)

My main interests in Linguistics are syntax and Italian dialects. I began studying Italian at UC Davis which led me to study abroad in Florence. While there, I was introduced to the complexity of Italian dialects along with the way in which Standard Italian developed. I finished at Davis with a double major in Linguistics and Italian, reflecting my two main interests.

Michael Obiri-Yeboah

(University of Ghana)

My interest in linguistics dates back to my undergraduate studies at the University of Ghana. In view of that, I proceeded for my Master of Philosophy in Linguistics after my undergraduate studies. My areas of interest in linguistics are phonetics, phonology, syntax, language documentation and pragmatics. Akan and Gua (gwa) are my languages of focus for my research. I intend to continue my studies at UCSD, concentrating in part on Gua tonology and other related areas.

Crono Tse

(University of Hong Kong)

My research interests lie on compositional semantics and its interface with pragmatics, with a focus on how various kinds of presupposition are encoded in linguistic units and regulated in language use. I began the learning journey with examining several grammatical elements in Cantonese Chinese, my first language, such as a nominal element mau5 (something comparable to "certain") that usually induces referential specificness and an epistemic adverb mai6 that is conceived as "obviously" or "then". These studies have motivated me to look into broader issues like specificity and epistemic modality cross-linguistically: how languages may differ in those dimensions?

Matt Zaslansky

(SUNY Buffalo)

Currently I am primarily interested in researching reference maintenance in sign languages, particularly Russian Sign Language, which situates my research at the syntax-pragmatics interface. In particular, I hope to contribute to the typology of information structure in sign languages and to investigate the effects of modality. Besides sign languages, I have worked with spoken languages in the Caucasus (Azerbaijani, Tat), and because of particular phenomena in heritage language language discourse, I worked with heritage speakers of Korean for my undergraduate thesis on reference. My love for language documentation and linguistic fieldwork has led me to begin working with the Endangered Language Alliance in New York until I move to San Diego. I look forward to joining the department.