Yale Linguistics welcomes new cohort of graduate students

August 28, 2015

The Yale University Department of Linguistics is proud to welcome four graduate students who begin their doctoral studies this fall. They were inducted into the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the matriculation ceremony on August 27, 2015, and each brings a unique set of background interests and scholarly experience that will enrich our department for years to come.

Rose Berger joins us from Wheaton College (Norton, Massachusetts), where she graduated in 2015. At Wheaton, she worked as part of the Lexomics Research Group, co-authoring a paper asserting the relationship between two Old Icelandic sagas and the implications of this relationship for a model of the relative chronology of the Old Icelandic sagas. She has also published on closed syllable constraints and vowel harmony in Proto-Russian loanwords. Rose had previously worked in Yale’s Pama-Nyungan Lab in the summer of 2014 on the subgrouping of Western Desert languages, and now resumes research in the lab on Pama-Nyungan phonology. 

Jun Chen earned a B.A. in Economics and Linguistics and a B.S. in Finance from SUNY-Buffalo. Her research involves semantics/pragmatics from the perspectives of psycholinguistics/neurolinguistics and linguistic change, and she has presented on such topics as semantic change in Chinese numeral phrase constructions. She works on Mandarin Chinese and Miyako Ryukyuan languages. 

Manu Quadros graduated with a B.A. in English and Portuguese (2009) and an M.A. in Linguistics (2015) from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil. As an undergraduate, he conducted research on the interaction of morphology and phonological variation in varieties of Portuguese spoken in the south of Brazil. For his master’s thesis, he investigated subregularities in the distribution of rival patterns of nominalization in Brazilian Portuguese.

Also formally joining the doctoral program this year is Matt Tyler, who has been a well-established member of the department for two years through his position as a Mellon Fellow, an exchange program for graduates of Yale University and Clare College, Cambridge. He graduated with a B.A. in linguistics at the University of Cambridge (Clare College) in 2013, and works in theoretical syntax. Acting effectively as any other graduate student, Matt defended his first qualifying paper, “Reflexes of locality and A’-movement in indexical shift,” in April 2015. Although he is effectively a third-year graduate student, we are still happy to have him continue his studies in our department.

It is our pleasure to have such an excellent group of students join our program, and we all look forward to working with them in the years to come!

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