Welcome new graduate students!
We are pleased to announce the following graduate students will be joining the department in the 2020-21 academic year. Please join us in welcoming them!
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Claudia Duarte-Borquez
UC San Diego
I am interested on theoretically informed research on documentary and descriptive linguistics in Otomanguean languages. This includes research on the phonetic, phonological, and morphological patterns and phenomena of these languages, and their interaction. More generally, I am interested in continuing to contribute to the development of the typology of tone languages and our understanding of the interaction between grammatical and lexical tone. I am highly interested on conducting fieldwork with Otomanguean communities and contribute to the community of speakers of these less studied languages by developing linguistic corpora and providing a record that native speakers can use for their own needs in the preservation and conservation of their languages.
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Ebru Evcen
Middle East Technical University
Broadly speaking, I am interested in the issues at the interface between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics cross-linguistically. My research focuses on how, as language unfolds, we incrementally build representations of the events described by that unfolding language and how speakers develop a sufficiently rich linguistic meaning during comprehension. In my Master’s thesis, I investigated the processing of conditional statements by using psycholinguistics methods, and at UCSD, I intend to extend my work by focusing on counterfactuals.
Email: eevcen
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Olivia Griffin
University of Ottawa
My main interests are in computational linguistics, phonological theory, fieldwork, and formal semantics. I want to pursue computational methods as a means of formalizing linguistic processes, and understanding their properties and predictions. Likewise, I am interested in conducting fieldwork in order to better understand how well different approaches model natural language. I am specifically interested in defining classes of functions, and using them for analysis and modelling of linguistic processes and phenomena; I want to learn more about how functions can be described, and about how definitions can be tested to ensure that they accomplish their intended purpose.
Email: ogriffin
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Benjamin Lang
New York University
I’m interested in phonetics and neurolinguistics. With these fields as a lens, I study bilingualism, language acquisition, and speech production and perception. I’m particularly drawn to discussions considering whether or not the bilingual or multilingual brain is special, testing the Critical Period Hypothesis, and investigating the mental representation (perception) and coordination (production) of speech gestures. Recently, I have worked on phonetic drift in the vowel spaces of American English L1 learners of French as L2, differences in articulation of speech gestures of standard and dialectal varieties of Arabic, decoding neural responses to non-native vowels in the human auditory cortex, and the gestural coordination of glottalization in American English. My hope is that continuing in this line of research contributes to broader instances of second language acquisition and a more detailed understanding of language in human cognition.
Email: blang
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Jun Jie Lim
My interests lie broadly in syntax and its interfaces, and syntactic change and variation. I'm especially interested in Altaic and East Asian languages, and Singlish, an English-lexified creole with grammatical features from Sinitic varieties and Malay, spoken in my home country. I have previously worked on echo questions in English, and I have ongoing projects on describing and analysing socio-grammatical and grammaticalisation phenomena in Singlish. I’m also currently investigating genitive pronouns and possessives in Mongolian. When I’m not doing linguistics, I enjoy baking and practicing yoga.
Email: jjlim
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Milad Mayel
Among my chief interests is phonetic variation. In the past, I have worked with vowel intrusion and its phonotactic environments across natural languages and would like to continue similar endeavors in the future, specifically with dialects of Arabic and Farsi. As a speaker, I am deeply invested in and fascinated with these languages, the variations in modern dialects which exist today, and the phenomenon of diglossia which I have observed in San Diego and abroad. In addition, I am highly interested in pragmatic enrichment and am currently looking at examples of extrasemantic enrichment in the field. Beyond this, I have conducted extensive research on translanguaging practices, in relation to issues of second-language acquisition, in the context of adolescent education. I am very passionate about bilingual education and teaching linguistically-minoritized students. -
Anthony Struthers-Young
University of Michigan
My primary interests are in documentation and phonology, especially tonal phonology and other suprasegmental features. I have done extensive fieldwork in southwest Burkina Faso on the Toussian languages, where, in addition to the spoken languages, I study the Toussian musical surrogate language, which is a way to encode speech using the balafon, a xylophone-like instrument. Studying musical surrogate languages, beyond simply being a fascinating and little-studied phenomenon, is a useful tool for tonal analysis that can also potentially reveal how speakers conceptualize their language.
Email: astruthe