Bios of Current Graduate Students
Ph.D. Program
Scott AnderBois does work primarily in formal semantics, with a particular focus on semantic issues in Yukatek Maya (through fieldwork). In particular, he has done work on the connection between polar questions and disjunction as well as work on the semantics of deixis and definiteness. Last year, he completed his phonology QP on the nature of strong position and laryngeal features in Yukatek Maya.
Ryan Bennett graduated from NYU with BA's in Linguistics and Philosophy (2007). Ryan is primarily interested in phonology, and particularly in the way that phonetic factors help shape formal phonological systems. He is also interested in socially-conditioned linguistic variation. His current research languages include Irish and non-standard varieties of English.
Andrew Dowd originally comes to UCSC from Rutgers University, where he earned a BA in Linguistics in 2000. His current research interests include the nature of underlying representations in morphological paradigms and prosody, especially the prosody of Irish and the syntax-prosody interface. In the most recent quarter, Andrew completed a qualifying paper on base-selection criteria in Pengo.
Judith Fiedler is a third-year PhD student. Her area of concentration is syntax, with a particular interest in German. Her current research concerns prosodic constraints affecting the sentential position of German weak pronouns.
Vera Gribanova is a fifth-year student with an interest in the morphosyntax of Slavic languages, in particular Russian and Bulgarian. She has worked on the morphosyntax of Bulgarian definiteness marking (with Ascander Dost) and the typology and interpretation of coordinated multiple wh-questions (to appear in Linguistic Inquiry). More recently she has been working on the morphophonology and morphosyntax of Russian prefixation. She has a concurrent interest in exploring Heritage Languages. [website]
Boris Harizanov graduated in 2007 from Harvard, with a major in Computer Science and a minor in Linguistics. His interests lie primarily in syntax. Previous research projects have focused on various topics in the morpho-syntax of Balkan languages, the processing of Russian numeral phrases, and modeling the gender system of Tsez. Boris has worked in the Lab for Language Processing and Heritage Languages at Harvard and plans to continue to use experimental methods in his work. He is currently an editorial assistant for Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.
Robert Henderson graduated with a BA in Linguistics from the University of Texas (2007). His interests span semantics, logic, and cognitive science. Robert is particularly interested in the syntax and semantics of indigenous languages of Latin America. His BA thesis was on aspects of extraction in Kaqchikel (Mayan), a language in which he has done substantial fieldwork. He is currently thinking a lot about scope and DP denotations in Mayan, as well as the syntax/prosody interface in K'ichee'. Robert hopes to put his linguistic expertise in the service of indigenous communities and speakers.
Abby Kaplan's research interests are in the phonetics-phonology interface: the implications of phonetic facts for formal phonological representations. Her projects in this area have included an investigation of the role of perceptual factors in the realization of nasal-stop clusters in English, the role of articulatory factors in intervocalic lenition, and the different effects of phonetic and phonological pressures on lexical frequency (recently presented at the OCP in Toulouse). Last summer, she was employed as a research assistant developing a computer dialogue system, and also attended the LSA Summer Institute. [website]
Jesse Saba Kirchner's main research is in morphophonology, with a focus on reduplication and other nonconcatenative phenomena. He is also pursuing work in language engineering in cooperation with the Information Systems Management program, with a focus on developing computational tools and methods for minority languages. Language interests include North American indigenous languages (especially Kwak'wala, Dakota and Tohono O'odham), as well as Yiddish and Chinese. Jesse has previously presented his work on ellipsis in Mandarin at S-TREND. [website]
Ruth Kramer works primarily on two Afroasiatic languages: Ancient Egyptian and Amharic (Ethio-Semitic). Her main theoretical interests are morphosyntax, the syntax of agreement, and root-and-pattern morphology. Her dissertation concerns the morphosyntax of concord and DP-internal clitics in Amharic and is based on original fieldwork. She presented her work on Amharic definite markers at the 2008 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, and currently has a manuscript under review for the journal Syntax. [website]
Alexa Mater has a BA in Mathematics from Reed (2006) and an MA from UPenn (2007). Alexa took a number of linguistics courses as an undergraduate, but started grad school in mathematics. She eventually came to her senses and switched to linguistics. She hasn't decided what kind of linguistics she likes best yet, though.
Amanda Morris's research interests are mostly syntactic. She studies ellipsis, and is currently writing a qualifying paper on the syntax of French polarity ellipsis, examining also Russian and Spanish. Amanda's P-side interests are still in development, but she likes articulatory phonetics and the analysis of stress systems.
Mark Norris graduated from the University of Iowa in 2007, with a major in Linguistics and a minor in French. At present, he is interested in both syntax and phonology. Previous research includes a paper on vowel harmony and consonant gradation in Finnish, and work with Madurese (Austronesian) texts. Mark also has a linguistic interest in Icelandic, having spent a year in Iceland as an undergraduate.
Justin Nuger specializes in syntax, but he also works in phonology and computational linguistics. His work concentrates on phenomena in Austronesian languages, and he is currently investigating Palauan causative and applicative constructions. In phonology, he has examined properties of Austronesian and Austroasiatic discontiguous reduplication, while his work in computational linguistics has centered around information retrieval and spoken dialogue applications. [website]
Jeremy O'Brien is a third-year PhD student. He is primarily interested in phonology, especially loanword phonology and phonetic groundings for phonological principles. Jeremy has worked on Japanese, Cantonese, Zulu, and Hindi-Urdu and other Indo-Aryan languages. He has also done research with computational modeling, including neural network models of inflectional morphology and Optimality Theory computation. Jeremy is currently working on his syntax QP, concerning morphology and lexical gaps in the English pronominal system. [website]
David Teeple is working on a dissertation centering on the constraints which correlate prominence with its phonetic correlates. He has presented this work at a number of conferences, including the 2008 LSA annual meeting and the 2008 GLOW conference. He will also be presenting work on Arabic impersonal passives at the 2008 NACAL. David has written a paper which will appear in the Proceedings of WCCFL 26, on phonology-syntax interactions in French. He has also written two lemmata which will appear in the next volume of the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics. [website]
Anie (Andrea) Thompson graduated last spring with a BA in Linguistics from Cornell. Her interests lie in morphosyntax, the syntax-semantics interface, and the structure of Japanese. Anie wrote a senior thesis on internally-headed relative clauses in Japanese, in which she sought a unified account of semantic restrictions on the head and the fact that it does not raise. She was a founding member and former president of UnderLings, an undergraduate group at Cornell which sponsors a regular international undergraduate linguistics conference.
Matthew Tucker is a second-year student in the Ph.D. program, originally from Cornell University (2007). His main interests lie at the interfaces of syntax with other parts of the grammar, as well as in computational linguistics. He works on Afroasiatic languages, especially Arabic and Berber, and has previously presented work on the morphosyntax of reflexives in Arabic, as well as the colloquial Arabic subject-verb agreement system. His current work touches on issues relating to deponent verbs in Distributed Morphology, Arabic fixed prosody and morphology, and the syntax of verb phrase ellipsis in Arabic. [website]
Paul Willis's main fields of research are phonology and semantics. In phonology, he is interested in issues at the phonetics interface, with special attention to Gestural Phonology and Dispersion Theory. His research interests in semantics include information structure and multiple-Wh questions. He is currently writing a qualifying paper in phonology which develops a game-theoretic account of external sandhi in English and Korean. Languages of research: English, German, Polish, Italian.
M.A. Program
Angela Aiello graduated from UCSC in 2003 with an undergraduate degree in Language Studies. Her interests include, but are not limited to, the preservation and study of dialects and of grammar variation, specifically on a syntactic and phonetic level. This interest extends to the many dialects in Italy, where she is currently teaching English. Angela has been awarded the position of Advising TA for the 2008-2009 academic year and is looking forward to her return to UCSC and the Linguistics Department.
Allison Day is a second-year M.A. student. She has worked on syntactic constructions in non-standard English. She is also interested in areas of interface, namely between syntax and morphology, and syntax and prosody.
Nico Feria graduated from UCSC in 2008, majoring in Linguistics and Psychology. His interests include syntax, Distributed Morphology, and semantics. His senior project was in semantics, looking at accusative and possessive gerundive nominalizations and their semantic differences. He also has taken some interest in models of cognitive psychology, specifically looking at models with acquisition patterns analogous to language as well as behavioral patterns possibly explainable by means of Optimality Theory.
Mira Hess graduated from UCSC in 2007, with a major in Linguistics. Her current interests include the evaluation of various theoretical models, with a focus on how well different models reflect language acquisition and speech production processes. She also has an interest in Pragmatics. Her senior project, which was in Phonology, explored various theoretical approaches to the apparent opacity that arises in derivations involving both Canadian vowel raising and flapping in English.
Nick LaCara graduated from UCSC in 2008 with a B.A. in Linguistics. His interests are primarily in syntax, along with phonology and phonetics. He spent a year abroad in England where he studied sociolinguistics and phonetic theory. Previous work includes investigations into the effects of relative clauses when they modify verb phrases and the distribution of FACE vowel allophones in the Newcastle dialect of English. He is interested in Portuguese, Old English, and Nordic languages and hopes to investigate these languages in the future.
Tiffany Lake is an M.A. student, with a B.A. from UCSC. She is interested in real and pseudo-clefts in English and Spanish as well as predicate clefts in Spanish. She is also interested in the syntax of non-standard English dialects.