Alumni – Linguistics

Distinguished Alumni

John Rickford (2024)
- Article
John Rickford (2022)
- Poster
- Article
Jason Merchant (2019)

PhD Alumni

2024

Lalitha Balachandran
Dissertation: Memory knows its bounds: Encoding contexts in sentence comprehension
Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Santa Cruz
Stephanie Rich
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Psychology, Concordia University
Dissertation: The Features We Use and the Features We Lose: Encoding, Maintenance, and Retrieval

2023

John (Jack) Duff
Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Language Science and Technology, Saarland University
Dissertation: On the timing of decisions about meaning during incremental comprehension
Morwenna Hoeks
Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute for Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück
Dissertation: Comprehending focus / representing contrast

2022

Andrew Angeles
Lecturer, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Cruz
Dissertation: Recursivity, prosodic, adjunction, and the role of informativeness in Kansai Japanese compound nouns
Ben Eischens
Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles
Dissertation: Tone, phonation, and the phonology-phonetics interface in San Martín Peras Mixtec
Andrew Hedding
Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Washington
Dissertation: How to move a focus: The syntax of alternative particles
Lisa Hofmann
Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of English Linguistics, University of Stuttgart
Dissertation: Anaphora and Negation
Nick Van Handel
Dissertation: The Sound of Silence: Investigations of Implicit Prosody

2021

Kelsey Sasaki
Junior Research Fellow in Linguistics, Jesus College, Oxford University
Dissertation: Components of Coherence
Tom Roberts
Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics, Utrecht University
Dissertation: How to make believe: inquisitivity, veridicality, and evidentiality in belief reports
Jake Vincent
Language Engineer, Amazon
Dissertation: Extraction from Relative Clauses: An Experimental Investigation of Variable Island Effects in English

2020

Steven Foley
Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistics, University of Georgia
Dissertation: Case, agreement, and sentence processing in Georgian
Margaret Kroll
Language Engineer, Cisco
Dissertation: Comprehending Ellipsis
Maho Morimoto
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Commerce, Chuo University
Dissertation: Geminated Liquids in Japanese: A production study
Jed Sam Pizarro-Guevara
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Dissertation: When Human Universal Meets Language Specific

2019

Jennifer Bellik
Analytical Linguist, Grammarly
Dissertation: Vowel Intrusion in Turkish Complex Onsets
Hitomi Hirayama
Lecturer, Faculty of Business and Commerce, Keio University
Dissertation: Asking and Answering Questions: Discourse Strategies in Japanese

2018

Nick Kalivoda
Researcher, Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University
Dissertation: Syntax-Prosody Mismatches in Optimality Theory
Kelsey Kraus
Senior Voice User Interface Designer, Cisco
Dissertation: Great Intonations
Jason Ostrove
Faculty Affairs Assistant, Graduate School of Education, Harvard University
Dissertation: When p-Agreement Targets Topics: The View from San Martín Peras Mixtec
Deniz Rudin
Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Southern California
Dissertation: Rising Above Commitment
Erik Zyman
Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago
Dissertation: On the Driving Force for Syntactic Movement

2017

Karen Duek
Dissertation: Sorting a complex world: An experimental study of polysemy and copredication in container and committee nominals

2016

Nathan Arnett
Dissertation: Interference and complexity effects in subject retrieval
Karl DeVries
Senior Linguist, Google
Dissertation: Independence friendly dynamic semantics: Integrating exceptional scope, anaphora and their interactions
Anna Greenwood
Program Manager, Text-to-Speech, Google
Dissertation: An experimental investigation of phonetic naturalness
Bern Samko
Senior Linguist, Appen
Dissertation: Syntax and information Structure: The grammar of English inversions

2014

Judith Fiedler
Teacher, August Martin High School, New York, NY
Dissertation: Germanic it-clefts: Structural variation and semantic uniformity
Boris Harizanov
Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University
Dissertation: On the mapping from syntax to morphophonology
Mark Norris
Analytical Linguist, Grammarly
Dissertation: A theory of nominal concord
Oliver Northrup
Analytical Linguist, Google
Dissertation: Grounds for commitment
Anie Thompson
Associate Linguistics Consultant, Lighthouse
Dissertation: Beyond deep and surface: Explorations in the typology of anaphora

2013

Matthew Tucker
Data Scientist, Amazon
Dissertation: Building verbs in Maltese

2012

Ryan Bennett
Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Cruz
Dissertation: Foot conditioned phonotactics and prosodic constituency
Robert Henderson
Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Arizona, Tucson
Dissertation: Ways of pluralizing events
Jeremy O’Brien
Analytical Linguist, Google
Dissertation: An experimental approach to debuccalization and supplementary gestures

2011

Scott AnderBois
Associate Professor and Deputy Chair, Department of Linguistics, Brown University
Dissertation: Issues and alternatives

2010

Vera Gribanova
Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University
Dissertation: Composition and locality: The morphosyntax and phonology of the Russian verbal complex
Abby Kaplan
Researcher and Data Scientist, Salt Lake Community College
Dissertation: Phonology shaped by phonetics: The case of intervocalic lenition
Jessica Kirchner
Senior Linguist, Google
Dissertation: Minimal reduplication
Justin Nuger
Senior Language Engineer, Amazon Music
Dissertation: Architecture of the Palauan verbal complex

2009

Ruth Kramer
Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University
Dissertation: Definite markers, phi features and agreement: A morphosyntactic investigation of the Amharic DP
David Teeple
Senior Language Engineer, Amazon Lab126
Dissertation: Biconditional prominence correlation

2008

Aaron Kaplan
Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Utah
Dissertation: Noniterativity is an emergent property of grammar
Kyle Rawlins
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University
Dissertation: Concession, conditionals, and free choice

2007

Peter Alrenga
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, Rutgers
Dissertation: Dimensionality in the semantics of comparatives
Ascander Dost
Lead Senior Software Engineer, SalesforceIQ
Dissertation: Linearization, square pegs, and round holes
James Isaacs
Senior Software Engineer, GovWizely
Dissertation: Supposition in discourse
Florence Woo
TranslatorsCafé.com
Dissertation: Prepositional predicates in Nuu-chah-nulth

2006

Anya Lunden-Hogoboom
Associate Professor and Director, Linguistics Program, Department of English, College of William and Mary
Dissertation: Weight, final lengthening and stress: A phonetic and phonological case study of Norwegian
Emily Manetta
Associate Professor, Program of Linguistics and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, University of Vermont
Dissertation: Peripheries in Kashmiri and Hindi-Urdu
Anne Sturgeon
Project Manager, Agent IQ
Dissertation: The syntax and pragmatics of contrastive topic in Czech
Lynsey Wolter
Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire
Dissertation: That’s that: The semantics and pragmatics of demonstrative noun phrases

2005

Daniel Karvonen
Senior Lecturer, Finnish Studies Program, University of Minnesota
Dissertation: Word prosody in Finnish
Vera Lee-Schoenfeld
Associate Professor, Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies, University of Georgia
Dissertation: Beyond coherence: The syntax of opacity in German

2004

Line Mikkelsen
Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley
Dissertation: Specifying who: On the structure, meaning, and use of specificational copular clauses
Andrew Wedel
Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Arizona
Dissertation: Self-organization and categorical behavior in phonology

2003

Dylan Herrick
Department Chair, Associate Professor of Linguistics, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, University of Oklahoma
Dissertation: An acoustic analysis of phonological vowel reduction in six varieties of Catalan
Christopher Potts
Professor, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University
Dissertation: The logic of conventional implicatures
Nathan Sanders
Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, and Associate Chair, Undergraduate, Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto
Dissertation: Opacity and sound change in the Polish lexicon

2002

Rodrigo Gutiérrez Bravo
Professor of Linguistics, El Colegio de México
Dissertation: Structural markedness and syntactic structure: A study of word order and the left periphery in Mexican Spanish

2001

Christine Gunlogson
Professor Emerita, Department of Linguistics, University of Rochester
Dissertation: True to form: Rising and falling declaratives as questions in English
Kazutaka Kurisu
Professor, Department of English, Kobe College
Dissertation: The phonology of morpheme realization

2000

Ryan Bush
Dissertation: A typology of focal categories
Adam Panter Ussishkin
Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Arizona
Dissertation: The emergence of fixed prosody

1999

Jason Merchant
Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, and Lorna P. Straus Professor, Department of Linguistics and the College, University of Chicago
Dissertation: The syntax of silence: Sluicing, islands, and identity in ellipsis

1998

Motoko Katayama
Dissertation: Optimality Theory and Japanese loanword phonology
Rachel Walker
Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Cruz
Dissertation: Nasalization, neutral segments, and opacity effects

1997

Chris Kennedy
William H. Colvin Professor of Linguistics, University of Chicago
Dissertation: Projecting the adjective: The syntax and semantics of gradability and comparison
Philip Spaelti
Assistant Professor, Kobe Shoin Women’s University
Dissertation: Dimensions of variation in multi-pattern reduplication

1996

Eric Potsdam
Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Florida
Dissertation: Syntactic issues in the English imperative

1995

Brian O’Herin
International Linguistics Coordinator, SIL International
Dissertation: Case and agreement in Abaza

1994

Cheryl Black
Linguistics Consultant, SIL International
Dissertation: Quiegolani Zapotec syntax
Theodore Fernald
Professor, Department of Linguistics, Swarthmore College
Dissertation: On the nonuniformity of the individual- and stage-level effects
Michael Johnston
Post-Doctoral Researcher, Research Lab for Linguistics and Computation, Brandeis University
Dissertation: The semantics of adverbial adjuncts
Robin Schafer
Dissertation: Nonfinite predicate initial constructions in Breton
Peter Svenonius
Professor and Director of CASTL, Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Tromsø
Dissertation: Dependent nexus: Small clauses in English and the Scandinavian languages

1993

H. Andrew Black
SIL International
Dissertation: Constraint-ranked derivation: A serial approach to optimization
Cathal Doherty
Associate Professor, Department of Theology, Marquette University
Dissertation: Clauses without ‘that’: The case for bare sentential complementation in English

1992

Louise McNally
Professor of Linguistics, Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
Dissertation: An interpretation for the English existential construction

1991

Chris Barker
Professor and Chair, Department of Linguistics, New York University
Dissertation: Possessive descriptions
John Moore
Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego
Dissertation: Reduced constructions in Spanish

MA Alumni