Welcome to new grad students in 2016-2017!
Chantal Gratton (York University, University of Ottawa)
While my interest in linguistics is rooted in my affinity for studying languages and cultural practices, I didn’t discover the field itself until the third year of my undergraduate degree when I stole into a friend’s phonetics course one afternoon. I then sought my MA in Linguistics at York University, where I conducted sociolinguistic fieldwork with a non- binary transgender community of practice and examined intraspeaker variation within the group. I have worked on various urban fieldwork projects, primarily in Ottawa and the Greater Toronto Area, Canada. I am interested in language variation and sociophonetics, with a focus on gender and identity.
Michael Hahn (University of Edinburgh)
My interests are in computational linguistics, syntax, and computational cognitive science. Currently, I am working on using neural networks to build wide-coverage models of human language processing that can be evaluated against large-scale human data such as eyetracking corpora. Previously, I have done research on the syntax of Khoesan languages and have done fieldwork on Khoekhoe. Besides linguistics, I have done an MSc in Mathematics and have worked on the application of ideas from topology to computational complexity.
Omer Korat (Tel Aviv University at Tel Aviv, Israel)
Since I was a toddler I have been interested in languages and how they work. I found out about theoretical linguistics during highschool and I have been immediately captivated by the idea of formalizing natural language using a recursive set of rules. I was particularly fascinated by the attempt to formalize meaning using logical propositions with truth conditions. I am currently working on my MA in linguistics, focusing on formal semantics in Tel Aviv University, where I also completed my BA in linguistics. I spent the last autumn semester in the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation in the University of Amsterdam as an exchange student, where I have been encouraged to think beyond the classical truth-conditional approach to natural language semantics. In Stanford, I plan to follow this line of thought and study probablistic/computational approaches to meaning and conversation.
Emily Lake (Queen Mary, University of London; SOAS, University of London)
I became fascinated in how language works – both its social meaning in context, and its functional form – when I took part in a Spanish exchange programme aged fourteen. My curiosity grew during my BA at SOAS, where I became engrossed in sound-symbolism and iconicity, writing my dissertation on the social motivations for ideophone loss in Zulu and Quechua. I am currently completing my MA at Queen Mary, investigating iconic properties of creaky-voice, particularly its use in young upper-class British men. Outside of linguistic study, I have worked in theatre, taught English, and worked for the UK Parliament (a treasure trove for sociolinguistic study!). I am thrilled to be starting the PhD at Stanford and look forward to working across the department.
Joining us Autumn 2017…
Brandon Waldon (University of Chicago)
I discovered my interest in the study of meaning as a student at the University of Chicago, where I completed my BA in Linguistics in 2015. Some of the problems I find most fascinating include implicature, L2 acquisition, subjectivity in language, and linguistic vagueness. I'm also interested in learning more about computational modeling, Bayesian and game-theoretic pragmatics, and experimental methods. I'm very excited to be joining the department in the fall of 2017 after a year at the Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin, where I'll be studying gradability, scale structure, and vagueness.