Alice Harris writes with an introduction to the incoming class of graduate students. They are:
Caroline Andrews graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She worked as a volunteer at the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado and is now volunteering on Alice Taffs project on documenting Tlingit. Caroline is interested in psycholinguistic work on less-studied languages and in the syntax-semantics interface.
Sakshi Bhatia has completed a BA, MA, and MPhil at the University of Delhi. She has worked on case in Indic languages (especially Mirzapur), on code switching from a Minimalist perspective, and on other syntactic topics, sometimes collaborating with Jyoti Iyer (see below). Sakshi plans to continue to work on formal syntax and semantics.
David Erschler did his undergraduate work at the Independent University of Moscow and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics at Tel Aviv University. As a self-taught linguist, he has published on typology, diachronic linguistics, and generative syntax and has worked extensively on Ossetic, an Iranian language spoken in the Caucasus. He is presently working at the University of Tuebingen and collaborating with linguists at the Max Planck in Leipzig. At UMass he wants to work on syntax and the syntax-phonology interface.
Ivy Hauser works in phonetics and phonology and is interested in phonological inventories, speech perception and production, and sociophonetics. She has written on the role of sonority in structuring phonological inventories and on speech tone perception. She comes to us from the University of North Carolina.
Jyoti Iyer has completed a BA, MA, and MPhil at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. She is interested in working on the syntax-semantics interface and has worked on nanosyntax, comparatives, grammaticalization, and the semantics of modals, among other topics.
Leland Kusmer comes to us from Swarthmore, where he took a fieldmethods course on Akan. He pursued this language on his own all the way to Ghana. Leland and Caroline (see above) worked together at the Institute for Collaborative Language Research on the Uda language of Nigeria. Leland is interested in combining linguistic theory with work on endangered languages.
Katya Vostrikova did undergraduate and graduate work in the philosophy of language, with her graduate degree from the Russian Academy of Sciences. She is interested in the syntax-semantics interface, especially the semantics of quantification.
Coral Williams' interests lie particularly in phonology. She has written on metathesis in Kambaata, a Highland East Cushitic language. Coral also has experience working in a lab to find effective clinical treatments for children with atypical linguistic development. She comes to us from the University of Indiana.
