Introducing our Incoming Ph.D. Students!

We want to introduce our incoming PhD cohort for Autumn 2021!  We send the members a very warm welcome: we're so glad you're joining the department!

We include a brief profile provided by each of the incoming students:

Sarah Al Motairi (Qassim University, Eastern Michigan University)

In 2009, I earned my BA in English Language, and since then I have been working as a teaching assistant in linguistics at Qassim University. In 2015, I received my MA in Linguistics from Eastern Michigan University. During my graduate study at EMU, I received training in both theoretical linguistics and sociolinguistics. My graduate research included syntactic investigations of tense and aspect within the generative tradition, where I focused on examining aspectual phrases in Arabic. Phonology was my main area of concentration. In my MA thesis I adopted an optimality-theoretic approach to analyze syllable structure and related phenomena in Qassimi Arabic. While the focus of my graduate research was mainly on the formal aspects of language, I had the opportunity to explore some social aspects of language use by examining the diglossic situation in Saudi Arabia. For my PhD study and research, I am broadly interested in phonetics and phonology, semantics and pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. I am particularly interested in social approaches to meaning and theories of indexicality, style, and persona construction. Issues that I am motivated to explore include voice quality and identity construction and the socio-pragmatics of politeness and speech acts in Arabic.

I am excited by the opportunities that await and look forward to being part of the linguistics community at Stanford.

Madelaine O'Reilly-Brown (McGill University)

I have a strong interest in the syntax and pragmatics of Hindi-Urdu, and in using elicitation tasks to gather data. Guiding my research is the question of how optionality in syntactic structure interacts with pragmatics. I have worked on topics such as clausal complementation, agreement morphology, and discourse markers. I am looking forward to broadening my research through fieldwork, the use of corpus data, and experimental methods. 

Marie Tano (Pomona College)

By the time I matriculate at Stanford, I will have received my BA in Cognitive Science with a double minor in Linguistics and Africana Studies. I didn’t actually become interested in linguistics specifically until I began to really pay attention to the raciolinguistics of social media. I am a huge proponent for interdisciplinary studies and so investigating online uses of African-American English quickly became my brand, as it was the perfect intersection between my fields of interest. My senior thesis examined how Black-accented speakers are affected by reverse linguistic stereotyping, and how online uses of AAE further anti-Black stereotypes. At Stanford, I look forward to pursuing a number of projects with different faculty members, but I am especially interested in applying psycholinguistic approaches to this question of what it means to “sound Black.”