Welcome to Our Incoming Ph.D. Students!

We are pleased to introduce the incoming Ph.D. cohort, who will be joining the department in the fall of 2022!  Please join us in giving them all a warm welcome—we’re so glad you’re joining us!

Below we include a brief profile of each of the incoming students:

Antón de la Fuente

I graduated from UC Santa Barbara in the Spring of 2021 with a BA in Linguistics and Philosophy. In my time there I developed an interest in how continuous data and formal systems are related. Though this is a broad topic spanning many fields, I find that a fascinating example of this occurs in human language when we consider how acoustic data is organized within a given language and the social context where it is used. Through a different thread of research, I worked on a project where I developed a L2 teaching tool for intonational prosody and I became puzzled by the high amount of variability in acoustic cues to simple contrasts, a difficult challenge for teaching. As I look to start my PhD, I would like to explore how variability in the acoustic signal can yield coherent phonological systems through the use of computational tools.

Emily Goodwin

I received my B.A. and M.A. in linguistics from McGill University. My work during my undergraduate and master's focused on compositional generalization in neural models for natural language processing. I am interested in computational tools to answer questions about meaning: how we represent the meanings of words and sentences, how we learn them, and how we generalize and use them in new contexts. I have spent the past year traveling and am greatly looking forward to joining the community at Stanford!

Wilfred Fimone

I join the Department after having completed an MA Linguistics thesis on the variable behavior of the glottal stop phoneme in onset and coda positions in Rotuman, my heritage language. I am particularly interested in style and indexicality in the broadest perspective. At Stanford, I hope to expand the existing research done on style-shifting, by triangulating approaches to tease apart styles due to agency (affect, personae, stance, etc.) from the less-controlled, vernacular style due to attentional load, as well as research on the change of linguistic forms and their social meanings across time. I aim to explore these topics with a focus on underrepresented, minority communities—particularly Pacific and queer communities.

Ahmad Jabbar

I have spent most of my life in Lahore, Pakistan, spending other chunks in Manchester, St Andrews, and Connecticut. My interest in Linguistics grew from my training in philosophy and formal logic. So far, my primary interests have been semantics and pragmatics; I have worked on question semantics, exhaustivity, discourse structure, and context-sensitivity. Along with pursuing my above interests at Stanford, I intend to study NLP, Bayesian modeling of cognition, and psycholinguistics. Questions of methodology and metasemantics also loom large for me.

Yin Lin Tan

My interests primarily lie in language variation, sociophonetics, interactional sociolinguistics, and language and identity. Another ongoing research interest of mine is bilingualism and multilingualism, especially issues to do with code-switching. I aim to integrate these different strands in my research; for example, my Honors thesis at the National University of Singapore looked at rhythmic variation in English-Mandarin code-switching among Singaporean speakers. While these are my current interests, I hope to work with and bring together different theories and methods in my future work, particularly by working with migrant and immigrant communities and subculture communities. I'm excited to start my PhD at Stanford this fall and look forward to joining the Department.

Irene Yi

I received my BA in Linguistics from UC Berkeley in 2021, where I worked on incorporating sociolinguistic factors of Mandarin-English bilingual codeswitching into computational models for my senior thesis. This past year, I've been working as a postbaccalaureate researcher at Yale with Professor Claire Bowern, focusing on topics in historical linguistics, phonetics and phonology, digital language archives, and working with communities in language revitalization and reclamation. My research interests fall generally in the realm of sound systems, variation, and change. During my graduate studies, I hope to investigate sociophonetic questions within the tones, prosody, and phonotactics of the Tianshui dialect of Mandarin (spoken in the Gansu province): in particular, seeing how modern indexical sociophonetic patterns in China play out in a diachronically conservative dialect such as Tianshui.