A warm welcome to our new graduate students. Here's some information about them and their research interests:

I grew up in the eastern, mountainous part of San Diego County. As an undergraduate, I attended UC Irvine and the University of Goettingen, majoring in linguistics and German. I completed my master's in German last spring at Georgetown. My disparate interests in linguistics include theoretical approaches to modeling language change and variation, various issues in formal syntax and phonology, and sociolinguistics (in its broadest sense). I'm looking forward to exploring new areas in the field, too.


I graduated from Tel Aviv University and am interested in investigating linguistics from a computational point of view, and in enhancing natural language processing by using linguistic analysis.

I am from Belgium where I did my graduate studies at the Université Catholique de Louvain. My native language is French as my accent cannot hide! So far I have been working in computational linguistics and I would like to specialize in semantics. Pragmatics is also one of my interests. As a Classics graduate, I would thoroughly enjoy carrying out work in Latin and Greek again.


I was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio and graduated from the Ohio State University. I've been married for three years and my wife, Angela, is originally from a small town in Northeastern Ohio. I am mostly interested in syntax, particularly issues pertaining to processing complexity, learnability and acquisition. Recently I have also become interested in typology, language contact and the interface between morphology and syntax.


I completed my undergraduate degree at Columbia University in Literature. After several years as a journalist, I moved to France to learn French and discovered linguistics, in which I obtained a Maîtrise from the Université de Grenoble 3. I then completed a M.Sc. in Logic from the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation in Amsterdam and went on to work at the Universität Konstanz on case semantics.


I'm originally from tornado-torn Iowa City but I haven't really lived on the farm since I went off to college (Yale '99). After getting my BA in English, I spent a year in Pakistan on a creative writing Fulbright, then moved to San Francisco (I'm a UI designer at Microsoft). I'm especially interested in how language works in human-technology interactions and in documenting endangered languages in Africa (how do dominant and endangered languages affect one another?).

We'd also like to welcome our various department visitors. Some of them and their research interests are included below. We'll tell you about other visitors in subsequent issues, including Heriberto Avelino, Adams Bodomo, Lars Hinrichs, and Daria Suk...

Sharon (an occasional Ballroom Dance competitor) is a postdoc in our department this year, having just finished her PhD in the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University, where she worked with Mark Johnson (PhD Stanford Linguistics, 1987). She has been focusing on computational linguistics, language acquisition, and the interface between the two and is particularly interested in unsupervised learning of language, and morphological and phonological acquisition.


John, who got his PhD in Cognitive Science from Johns Hopkins in 2003, is visiting us just for the Fall quarter. His research is in the area of computational linguistics, seen as part of the larger interdisciplinary enterprise of cognitive science. In his work, he relies on the formal methods of logic and probability, as well as the empirical findings of linguistics and psycholinguistics.


Graham is a Visiting Assistant Professor in our department this year, teaching courses primarily in semantics. Otherwise, he is a Lecturer in Computational Linguistics in the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Osnabrueck. He works on the formal and computational semantics of temporal expressions and adverbial modification, among other things. Graham is actually from Palo Alto; he got his BS in our Symbolic Systems Program and then went on to get his PhD in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Rochester.


Sander is here for the Autumn quarter to do corpus research on case assignment of Finnish adpositions. He recently finished a master's thesis on adpositional case and in January 2007 he'll start as a PhD student at the Radboud University Nijmegen, within Helen de Hoop's PIONIER Project: Case Cross-Linguistically. His research interests are: case, syntax, semantics, OT...

The department will have a very different feel this year, as so many of our graduate students have left the nest... Here's the most recent information we have on what they're doing:

• MONDAY, 25 SEPTEMBER
  UC Berkeley Linguistics Department Colloquium [http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/events/]
  4:00pm. 182 Dwinelle (Berkeley)
  Maria-Rosa Lloret (Universitat de Barcelona)
  Prominence-driven epenthesis: evidence from Alguerese Catalan



• THURSDAY, 28 SEPTEMBER
  CSLI Cognitive Science Lunch
  12:30 PM. Cordura Hall, Room 100.
  Hubert L. Dreyfus (UC Berkeley)
  Detachment, Freedom, and Rationality: Should we Accept McDowell's claim that we are essentially Rational Animals?



• FRIDAY, 29 SEPTEMBER
  Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop [http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/]
  3:00pm. Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
  Shiaowei Tham (Defense Language Institute) and Hooi Ling Soh (University of Minnesota/National University of Singapore)
  Discourse effects of lexical specification: The case of the Mandarin aspectual particle -LE

• For local linguistic events, always consult the Department's event page, available RIGHT HERE
  
  
• Got broader interests? The New Sesquiped recommends reading or even subscribing to the CSLI Calendar, available HERE.
  
  
• What's happening at UC Santa Cruz? Find out HERE.
  
  
• What's going on at UC Berkeley? Check it out HERE.
  
  

Want to contribute information? Want to be a reporter? Want to see something appear here regularly? Want to be a regular columnist? Want to take over running the entire operation? Contribute something at the top of this page (assuming that's working) or write directly to sesquip@gmail.com.