Welcome to our incoming graduate class!

We're pleased to announce that eight new graduate students will be joining the department in 2017-2018! Please join us in extending them a hearty welcome.

Christian Brickhouse (Cornell University)

I'm largely interested in the intersection between language and culture, especially language as a cultural product and means of production. I’m particularly interested in the role of the individual as an interpreter of their culture as a means and locus of linguistic variation. My senior thesis at Cornell dealt with reconciling the exemplar theory of production with contemporary social theory and investigating these hypotheses using the Supreme Court as a case study. I’m incredibly excited to begin my PhD at Stanford and to continue to think deeply about the interplay between languages and the cultures they are situated in.

Dora Demszky (Princeton University)

My primary interest is using large-scale, data-driven approaches to inform linguistic theory, with particular focus on semantics, cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics. Via computational tools, I hope to test and extend hypotheses pertaining to how language works in a given discourse and sociocultural context. Since my internship at the CSLI at Stanford, I have worked on collecting an inference dataset and investigating the linguistic phenomena that underlie entailment. Collaborating with Roger Levy at MIT, I have also examined the idiosyncratic use of English binomial expressions. My research projects at Princeton were about Hungarian noun incorporation and on the automatic grouping of Hungarian verbs into classes analogical to those of English, described by Beth Levin. I am excited to join the vibrant community of linguists at Stanford and continue pursuing my interdisciplinary interests that could not have found a better home.

Lewis Esposito (Swarthmore College)

As a first year, I ambivalently enrolled in an introductory linguistics course to fulfill a social sciences requirement, originally planning to major in East Asian or Chinese Studies. The class ended up being my favorite of the semester and led to me declaring a Linguistics & Languages major, combining coursework in theoretical linguistics, Mandarin Chinese, and Latin. At Swarthmore, I had the opportunity to contribute to several different projects centering on the documentation and revitalization of endangered languages, and I worked on a research project examining interactions between gender identity and creaky voice at Reed College. This project inspired my own work on creaky voice and its affective / social meanings in American English. Broadly, I am interested in third-wave approaches to language variation and change. More specific interests include the role of affect in phonetic variation, language and gender, associations between phonetic and prosodic features and body movements/facial features, the intersection between intonation, social meaning, and pragmatic meaning in English, and best practices for language revitalization. 

Yiwei Luo (Princeton University)

My primary interests are in semantics, language change, and computational approaches to both. I am currently involved in a project on the dynamics of sense growth in the English lexicon. I also recently completed a BA thesis on the semantics and information structure of the instrument subject construction at Princeton University, where I majored in linguistics with a minor in computer science. 

Zion Mengesha (University of California, Davis)

Being social justice oriented, my passion for linguistics was sparked in introductory linguistics when I learned about dialect discrimination. I earned my BA degrees in Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of California, Davis. Inspired by the Ann Arbor decision, I investigated teachers’ language attitudes toward AAVE in California public schools for my honors thesis. In Philosophy, I conducted an independent study about the pragmatics of ethnic and social slurs, and their proximation to epistemic injustice. I am currently working on a sociophonetic laboratory study about the effect of dialect on lexical recall. My research interests are in sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, phonetics, and the application of linguistics to education, law, and philosophy. I look forward to working with the Department and interdisciplinary scholars as a Graduate Fellow at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity in the Fall! I enjoy traveling and am studying at the Cours de Civilisation Française de la Sorbonne this summer.

Erika Petersen O'Farrill (University of Guadalajara, University of Freiburg)

I became interested in linguistics during my undergraduate studies in Spanish Literature, when I took a course on the interaction between syntax and the lexicon. After finishing my bachelor’s degree, I pursued a master’s degree in European Linguistics at the University of Freiburg. There I conducted research on Romance SE-constructions, in particular on Spanish anticausatives from a diachronic perspective. I am interested in the extent to which syntactic behavior is determinable from semantic properties. I am especially interested on verbal alternations from a cross-linguistic perspective. I would like to study how variation in the morpho-syntactic encoding of these alternations correlates with semantic or structural differences. I am also interested in studying aspects of meaning that affect syntactic behavior across various lexical categories.

I am very excited about joining the Stanford PhD in Linguistics program this fall! 

Eva Portelance (McGill University)

Before studying Linguistics I studied Textile Design. I love patterns and finding regularity in things of complex and creative nature. After my first degree, I travelled and during that time, I took great interest in learning the languages of the places I lived in. It became apparent that languages were a never ending set of patterns and strings that offered great creative power. Returning to Canada, I studied Linguistics at McGill, weaving in a minor in Computer Science. During my time there, I developed a keen interest in the computation of grammar formalisms and their generative capacities, as well as the interfaces of phonology and pragmatics with syntax, the exploration of which I truly look forward to continue at Stanford.

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, modality, and linguistic vagueness. I'm also interested in learning more about computational modeling, Bayesian and game-theoretic pragmatics, and experimental methods. I'm currently a Fulbright scholar at the Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin, where I've been pursuing projects related to linguistic vagueness, modality, and gradabilty.