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Ph.D. Alumni

Graduation Year: 2015

Alex Djalali

Engineeer, Argo
Dissertation Title: On adjectival comparatives

Seung Kyung Kim

Postdoctoral Scholar, Laboratoire Parole de Langage, CNRS/Université Aix-Marseille
Dissertation Title: Speech, variation, and meaning: The effects of emotional prosody on word recognition

Tania Rojas-Esponda

Google Research
Dissertation Title: Patterns and symmetries for discourse particles

Graduation Year: 2014

Eric Acton

Assistant Professor, Eastern Michigan University
Dissertation Title: Pragmatics and the social meaning of determiners

Matthew Adams

Dissertation Title: The comparative grammaticality of the English comparative

Roey Gafter

Postdoctoral researcher, University of Tel Aviv
Dissertation Title: “The most beautiful and correct Hebrew”: Authenticity, ethinic identity and linguistic variation in the greater Tel Aviv area

Katherine Geenberg

Localization Manager, Shmoop University, Inc.
Dissertation Title: The other California: Marginalization and Variation in Trinity County

Stephanie S. Shih

Assistant Professor, Cognitive & Information Sciences, University of California, Merced
Dissertation Title: Towards optimal rhythm

Jessica Spencer

Consultant, Gap International
Dissertation Title: Stochastic effects in the grammar: Toward a usage-based model of copula contraction

Graduation Year: 2013

Marisa Casillas (Tice)

Postdoctoral Researcher, Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands
Dissertation Title: Learning to take turns on time: Perception and production processes involved in keeping inter-speaker gaps short

Marie-Catherine de Marneffe

Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.
Dissertation Title: What’s that supposed to mean? Modeling the pragmatic meaning of utterances

Jason Grafmiller

Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Linguistics, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.
Dissertation Title: The semantics of syntactic choice: An analysis of English emotion verbs

Chigusa Kurumada

Assistant Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester
Dissertation Title: Navigating variability in the linguistic signal: Learning to interpret contrastive prosody

Sven Lauer

Postdoctoral Fellow, Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz, Germany
Dissertation Title: Towards a dynamic pragmatics

Graduation Year: 2012

Uriel Cohen Priva

Assistant Professor, Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences, Brown University
Dissertation Title: Sign and signal: Deriving linguistic generalizations from information utility

Olga Dmitrieva

Assistant Professor, School of Languages and Cultures and Linguistics Program, Purdue University
Dissertation Title: Geminate typology and the perception of consonant duration.

Scott Grimm

Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Rochester
Dissertation Title: Number and individuation

Alex Jaker

Postdoctoral Researcher, Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Dissertation Title: Prosodic reversal in Dogrib (Weledeh dialect)

Rob Munro

CEO, Idibon
Dissertation Title: Modeling variation in low resource languages

Melanie Owens

Dissertation Title: Serial verb constructions: Argument structural uniformity and event structural diversity

Tyler Schnoebelen

Chief Analyst, Idibon
Dissertation Title: Emotions are relational: Positioning and the use of affective linguistic resources

Rebecca Starr

Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore
Dissertation Title: Acquisition of sociolinguistic knowledge in a modern-English dual-immersion classroom

Graduation Year: 2010

Inbal Arnon

Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Dissertation Title: Starting big–The role of sequences in language learning and use

Rebecca Greene

Language Consultant, Understanding Language, Stanford University
Dissertation Title: Language, ideology and identity in rural Eastern Kentucky

Anubha Kothari

Senior Product Manager, Yahoo
Dissertation Title: Processing constraints and word order variation in Hindi relative clauses

Nola Stephens

Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Department of English, Covenant College
Dissertation Title: Given-before-new: The effects of discourse on argument structure in early child language

Hal Tily

Senior Data Scientist, Nuance Communications
Dissertation Title: The role of processing complexity in word order variation and change

Yuan Zhao D’Antilio

Senior Product/Test Development Manager, Pearson Knowledge Technologies
Dissertation Title: Statistical inference in the learning of novel phonetic categories

Graduation Year: 2009

Doug Ball

Assistant Professor of Linguistics, English & Linguistics Department, Truman State University
Dissertation Title: Clause structure and argument realization in Tongan

Elizabeth Coppock

Senior Researcher in Linguistics, Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg
Dissertation Title: The logical and empirical foundations of Baker’s Paradox

Iván García

Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, School of Languages, University of Salford, UK.
Dissertation Title: Generality and exception: A study in the semantics of exceptives

Lauren Hall-Lew

Lecturer in Sociolinguistics, Linguistics and English Language, School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh
Dissertation Title: Ethnicity and phonetic variation in a San Francisco neighborhood

Elisabeth Norcliffe

Research Staff, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen
Dissertation Title: Head marking in usage and grammar: A study of variation and change in Yucatec Maya

Laura Staum Casasanto

Lecturer, Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago
Dissertation Title: Experimental investigations of sociolinguistic knowledge

Graduation Year: 2008

Philip Hofmeister

Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences, Brown University
Dissertation Title: Representational complexity and memory retrieval in language comprehension

Dmitry Levinson

Dissertation Title: Licensing of negative polarity particles yet, anymore, either, and neither: Combining downward monotonicity and assertivity

Tatiana Nikitina

Researcher Officer First Class, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), in the LLACAN laboratory (Langage, Langues et Cultures d’Afrique Noire), Paris
Dissertation Title: The mixing of syntactic properties and language change

Neal Snider

Research Manager, Natural Language Understanding, Nuance Communications
Dissertation Title: An exemplar model of syntactic priming

Graduation Year: 2007

Bruno Estigarribia

Assistant Professor of Spanish, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, UNC Chapel Hill
Dissertation Title: Asking questions: Language variation and language acquisition

Itamar Francez

Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago
Dissertation Title: Existential propositions

Andrew Koontz-Garboden

Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, Department of Linguistics and English Language, University of Manchester
Dissertation Title: States, changes of state, and the monotonicity hypothesis

Graduation Year: 2006

Luc Vartan Baronian

Associate Professor of Linguistics, Département des arts et lettres, Université du Québec à Chicoutimi
Dissertation Title: North of phonology

John Travis Beavers

Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin.
Dissertation Title: Argument/oblique alternations and the structure of lexical meaning

Lev Blumenfeld

Assistant Professor, School of Linguistics and Language Studies, Carleton University.
Dissertation Title: Constraints on phonological interactions

Kathryn Campbell-Kibler

Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University.
Dissertation Title: Listener perceptions of sociolinguistic variables: The case of (ING)

Ashwini Deo

Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, Yale University.
Dissertation Title: Tense and aspect in Indo-Aryan: Variation and diachrony

T. Florian Jaeger

Associate Professor of Brain & Cognitive Science and Computer Science, Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester.
Dissertation Title: Redundancy and syntactic reduction in spontaneous speech

Arman Maghbouleh

Director, SP Software and Applications Group, Cisco Systems
Dissertation Title: Intonation recognition models based on convex optimizations

David Oshima

Associate Professor, Department of International Communication, Graduate School of International Development, Nagoya University.
Dissertation Title: Perspectives in reported discourse

Rob Podesva

Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University
Dissertation Title: Phonetic detail in sociolinguistic variation

Mary Rose

Data Manager, Ohio Department of Education
Dissertation Title: Language, place and identity in later life

Julie Sweetland

Director of Learning, FrameWorks Institute
Dissertation Title: Teaching writing in the African American classroom: A sociolinguistic approach

Judith Tonhauser

Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, Ohio State University.
Dissertation Title: The temporal semantics of noun phrases: Evidence from Guaraní

Graduation Year: 2005

Veronica Gerassimova

Senior Search Quality Analyst, Yahoo!
Dissertation Title: Unbounded dependency constructions in Western Austronesian

Roger Levy

Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, UC San Diego.
Dissertation Title: Probabilistic models of word order and syntactic discontinuity

Jean-Philippe Marcotte

Visiting Assistant Professor, Institute of Linguistics, University of Minnesota.
Dissertation Title: Causative alternation errors in child language acquisition

Sarah J. Roberts

Dissertation Title: The emergence of Hawai’i Creole English in the early 20th century: The sociohistorical context of creole genesis

Shiao-Wei Tham

Associate Professor of Chinese, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Wellesley College.
Dissertation Title: Representing possessive predication: Semantic dimensions and pragmatic bases

Graduation Year: 2004

Ash Asudeh

University Lecturer in Linguistics, Faculty of Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics, Oxford University
Dissertation Title: Resumption as resource management

Sarah Benor

Associate Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College-JIR in Los Angeles.
Dissertation Title: Second style acquisition: The linguistic socialization of newly Orthodox Jews

Brady Clark

Senior Lecturer and Weinberg College Adviser, Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University.
Dissertation Title: A stochastic optimality theory approach to syntactic change

Cathryn Donohue

Visiting Research Fellow, Linguistics, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University
Dissertation Title: Morphology matters: Case licensing in Basque

Hee-Sun Kim

Coordinator and Lecturer, Korean Language Program, Stanford University.
Dissertation Title: The use of multiple sources of information in Korean sentence processing

Jacquelyn Rahman

Associate Professor of Linguistics, Department of English, Miami University
Dissertation Title: It’s a serious business: The construction of middle-class white characters by African American narrative comedians

Graduation Year: 2003

Devyani Sharma

Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, Queen Mary, University of London.
Dissertation Title: Structural and social constraints on non-native varieties of English

Andrew Wong

Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, California State University East Bay.
Dissertation Title: Tongzhi, ideologies, and semantic change

Graduation Year: 2002

Martina Theresia Faller

Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, School or Arts, Language and Cultures, University of Manchester
Dissertation Title: Semantics and pragmatics of evidentials in Cuzco Quechua

John Stephen Fry

Japanese-English Translator, Fry Translation, and Adjunct Lecturer, Department of English
Dissertation Title: Ellipsis and wa-marking in Japanese conversation

Stefan Heinz Kaufmann

Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Connecticut.
Dissertation Title: Aspects of the meaning and use of conditionals

Michael Thomas Wescoat

Dissertation Title: On lexical sharing

Graduation Year: 2001

Makin McDaid Abdulkhaliq

Senior Quality Assurance Analyst, CoStar Group.
Dissertation Title: English noun classes and generative lexical mechanisms

Emily Menon Bender

Associate Professor and Director of MS in Computational Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, University of Washington.
Dissertation Title: Syntactic variation and linguistic competence: The case of AAVE copula absence

Hanjung Lee

Professor, Integrated English Linguistics and Literature Specialist (IELL) Education Program, Sungkyunkwan University
Dissertation Title: Optimization in argument expression and interpretation: A unified approach

David Alexander McKercher

Lecturer, Department of Linguistics, University of Victoria.
Dissertation Title: The polysemy of with in first language acquisition

Eunjin Oh

Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature at Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea.
Dissertation Title: Non-native coarticulation: The case of consonant-vowel syllables

Susanne Zalta Riehemann

Machine intelligence group- google
Dissertation Title: A constructional approach to idioms and word formation

Ida Elisabet Toivonen

Assistant Professor, School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Carleton University.
Dissertation Title: The phrase-structure of non-projecting words

Qing Zhang

Associate Professor, School of Anthropology, The University of Arizona.
Dissertation Title: Changing economy, changing markets: A sociolinguistic study of Chinese yuppies

Graduation Year: 2000

Yukiko Morimoto

Dissertation Title: Discourse configurationality in Bantu morphosyntax

Graduation Year: 1999

Brett L. Kessler

Research Scientist, Psychology Department, Washington University in St. Louis.
Dissertation Title: Estimating the probability of historical connections between languages

Julie Solomon

Principal and Member, J. Solomon Consulting, LLC, Mountain View, CA
Dissertation Title: Phonological and syntactic variation in the Spanish of Valladolid, Yucatan

Graduation Year: 1998

Arto Tapani Anttila

Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University.
Dissertation Title: Variation in Finnish phonology and morphology

Jennifer E. Arnold

Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Dissertation Title: Reference form and discourse patterns

Bradley Cahn Davidson

General Manager, Ogilvy CommonHealth Behavioral Insights
Dissertation Title: Interpreting medical discourse: A study of cross-linguistic communication in the hospital clinic

Martha Swearingen Davis

Dissertation Title: A syntactic, semantic and diachronic analysis of Palenquero BA

Vivienne Funn Fong

Academic Director, Undergraduate Advising and Research, Stanford University
Dissertation Title: The order of things: What directional locatives denote

Robert P. Malouf

Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics & Asian/Middle Eastern Languages, San Diego State University.
Dissertation Title: Mixed categories in the hierarchical lexicon

Rachel Nordlinger

Associate Professor and Reader, Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, University of Melbourne
Dissertation Title: Constructive case: Dependent-marking nonconfigurationality in Australia

Scott A. Schwenter

Associate Professor, Hispanic Linguistics, Ohio State University
Dissertation Title: The pragmatics of conditional marking: Implicature, scalarity, and exclusivity

Chang Yong Sohn

Seoul National University, Korea
Dissertation Title: The metrical structure of Beowulf

Graduation Year: 1997

Renee Allison Blake

Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, New York University
Dissertation Title: All o’ we is one? Race, class, and language in a Barbados community

Hye-Won Choi

Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea
Dissertation Title: Optimizing structure in context: Scrambling and information structure

Anthony Ruiz Davis

Dissertation Title: Lexical semantics and linking in the hierarchical lexicon

Yookyung Kim

Principal Linguist, Yahoo Inc.
Dissertation Title: A situation semantic account of existential sentences

Charles Chieh-li Lee

Dissertation Title: The human sentence processor: Memory structure and accessibility

Norma Mendoza-Denton

Professor, Department of Anthropology, UCLA
Dissertation Title: Chicana/Mexicana identity and linguistic variation: An ethnographic and sociolinguistics study of gang affiliation in an urban high school

Hadar Shemtov

Research Scientist, Palo Alto Research Center.
Dissertation Title: Ambiguity management in natural language generation

Graduation Year: 1996

Elizabeth Owen Bratt

Senior Research Engineer, CSLI, Stanford University.
Dissertation Title: Argument composition and the lexicon: Lexical and periphrastic causatives in Korean

Rudolf Pell Gaudio

Associate Professor of Anthropology, School of Natural and Social Sciences, Purchase College, SUNY
Dissertation Title: Men who talk like women: Language, gender, and sexuality in Hausa Muslim society

Hinrich Schuetze

Chair of Theoretical Computational Linguistics, University of Stuttgart.
Dissertation Title: Ambiguity in language learning: Computional and cognitive models

Graduation Year: 1995

Lynn Cherny

Data analysis consultant- Ghostweather
Dissertation Title: The mud register: Conversational modes of action in a text-based virtual reality

Jennifer Ann Cole

Assistant (Assistant Professor), Universität Konstanz.
Dissertation Title: The prosodic domain hierarchy in reduplication

Richard Byrd Dasher

Executive Director, Center for Integrated Systems and Director, US-Japan Management Program, Stanford University.
Dissertation Title: Grammaticalization in the system of Japanese predicate honorifics

Daniel Dor

Senior Lecturer, Department of Communication, Tel Aviv University
Dissertation Title: An epistemically-based analysis of lexical selection

Jong-Bok Kim

Professor, School of English, Kyung Hee University.
Dissertation Title: The grammar of negation: A lexicalist, constraint-based perspective

Christopher D. Manning

Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics and Department of Computer Science, Stanford University.
Dissertation Title: Ergativity: Argument structure and grammatical relations

Christopher Jude Piñón

Research and teaching in linguistics, UFR Angellier (“Unité de formation et de recherche Angellier”), Université de Lille 3, Lille, France.
Dissertation Title: An ontology for event semantics

Whitney Tabor

Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut.
Dissertation Title: Syntactic innovation: A connectionist model

Graduation Year: 1994

Eunjoo Han

Seoul Women’s University, Korea.
Dissertation Title: Prosodic structure in compounds

Makoto Kanazawa

Associate Professor, National Institute of Informatics
Dissertation Title: Learnable classes of categorial grammars

Bonnie McElhinny

Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto
Dissertation Title: We all wear the blue: Language, gender and police work

Kurt Jonathan Queller

Instructor, Departments of English and of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Idaho
Dissertation Title: Scheming and manipulating: How phonological structure emerges out of the child’s manipulation of output lexical form

Gillian C. Ramchand

Professor, Institute for Linguistics, University of Tromsø
Dissertation Title: Aspect and argument structure in modern Scottish Gaelic

Trisha Ann Svaib

Dissertation Title: “Twice upon a time”: A deaf child’s development of narrative structure

Linda Uyechi

Lecturer, Department of Music, Stanford University
Dissertation Title: The geometry of visual phonology

Graduation Year: 1993

Alexandre Alsina

Professor, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Translation and Language Sciences
Dissertation Title: Predicate composition: A theory of syntactic function alternations

Miriam Jessica Butt

Professor, Department of Linguistics, Universität Konstanz
Dissertation Title: The structure of complex predicates in Urdu

Masayo Iida

Dissertation Title: Context and binding in Japanese

Michael Vincent Inman

Director and U.S. Development Partner, Pollimath.com
Dissertation Title: Semantics and pragmatics of colloquial Sinhala involitive verbs

Smita Joshi

Dissertation Title: Selection of grammatical and logical functions in Marathi

Tracy Holloway King

Director of Engineering, Refinements and Universal Search, Search Science, eBay
Dissertation Title: Configuring topic and focus in Russian

Yo Matsumoto

Professor, Department of Linguistics, Kobe University
Dissertation Title: On the wordhood of complex predicates in Japanese

John Hamilton McWhorter, V

Associate Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Dissertation Title: Toward a new model of genesis: Competing processes in the birth of Saramaccan Creole

Shuichi Yatabe

Professor, Department of Language and Information Sciences, University of Tokyo
Dissertation Title: Scrambling in Japanese phrase structure

Graduation Year: 1992

Lubna Alsagoff

Associate dean special projects NFE SIngapore
Dissertation Title: Topic in Malay: The other subject

Jonathan Ginzburg

Professor, UFR d’Études anglophones Université Paris–Diderot (Paris 7)
Dissertation Title: Questions, queries and facts: A semantics and pragmatics for interrogatives

Aaron Halpern

Dissertation Title: Topics in the placement and morphology of clitics

Andras Kornai

Professor, Budapest Institute of Technology
Dissertation Title: Formal phonology

Paul R. Kroeger

Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics, Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics
Dissertation Title: Phrase structure and grammatical relations in Tagalog

John C. Paolillo

Dissertation Title: Functional articulation in diglossia: A case study of grammatical and social correspondences in Sinhala

Henry Edward Smith

Dissertation Title: Restrictiveness in case theory

Fu Tan

Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Languages. San Jose State University
Dissertation Title: Notion of subject in Chinese

Stephen Mark Wechsler

Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Texas, Austin
Dissertation Title: Argument structure and linking

Graduation Year: 1991

Abdullahi Bature

Professor, Department of Nigerian Languages, Bayero State University
Dissertation Title: Thematic arguments and semantic roles in Hausa

Young-Mee Yu Cho

Associate Professor, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, Rutgers University
Dissertation Title: Parameters of consonantal assimilation

Kristin Hanson

Associate Professor, Department of English, University of California, Berkeley
Dissertation Title: Resolution in modern meters

Ki-Sun Hong

Associate Professor, Department of English, Seoul National University, Korea.
Dissertation Title: Argument selection and case marking in Korean

John Stonham

Professor of Linguistics, Division of English Language and Literature, Pukyong National University
Dissertation Title: Current issues in morphological theory