Three new graduate students join Yale

August 30, 2017

Three new graduate students in the Department of Linguistics began their first classes at Yale today after participating in the matriculation ceremony and orientation activities of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Our new cohort represents a diverse array of backgrounds and interests, hailing from three different countries and covering the core subfields of syntax, semantics, morphology, and phonology, as well as historical linguistics and language variation.

Samuel Andersson is originally from Stockholm, Sweden, where he lived until leaving for college at the University of Cambridge. He graduated last year from Christ’s College with a BA in Linguistics, writing his undergraduate dissertation on the phonology of European Portuguese. Samuel has done substantial work on the phonology of Swedish. He has argued that the language contains at least seventeen vowel phonemes, and he was the first to document an innovative process of vowel raising popular among speakers of the Stockholm dialect. Samuel has also worked on historical phonology, language games, and the phonology of language contact, as well as the Northwest Caucasian language Abkhaz. During his time at Yale, Samuel hopes to continue working on these topics while exploring functional explanations of typological patterns in morphology and syntax.

Sigríður Sæunn Sigurðardóttir is a graduate of the University of Iceland, where she earned a BA in Icelandic in 2011 and an MA in Icelandic Studies in 2014. For the past year and a half, Sigríður has been working as a research assistant at the University of Konstanz, contributing to a project on the production and perception of rhetorical questions. Prior to joining Konstanz, Sigríður worked on the Evolution of Case, Alignment and Argument Structure in Indo-European (EVALISA) project at Ghent University. Sigríður is interested in all areas of linguistics, but her main interests lie in historical linguistics, with a focus on syntax and argument structure.

Randi Martinez joins us from Arizona State University, where she graduated summa cum laude from Barrett, the Honors College with a BA in Linguistics. For her senior thesis, Randi created a new language for a fantasy fiction novel. Randi has come to Yale to participate in a post-baccalaureate program, in which she will be conducting research on non-standard constructions in North American English. Randi’s interests are in syntax, semantics, and morphosyntactic variation.

We are very excited to welcome Samuel, Sigríður, and Randi to our department, and we are looking forward to working with them in the years to come!

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