People

Ousmane Cisse defends his dissertation prospectus

Last month, PhD candidate Ousmane Cisse successfully defended his dissertation prospectus! His dissertation is based on the preliminary results of his second qualifying paper (QP2). As part of this work, he is investigating graphemic variations in the representation of engma and their sociolinguistic implications in Casamance Mandinka Ajami. His data is from the NEH Mandinka […]

Michael Everdell presents at SALT

Professor Michael Everdell and his colleague Prerna Nadathur presented a popular poster at the SALT (Semantics and Linguistic Theory) conference! You can view their handout on Mike’s website: https://michael-everdell.github.io/files/SALT35_handout_2025.pdf

Liza Sulkin defends her dissertation prospectus

Congratulations to PhD candidate Liza Sulkin who defended her dissertation prospectus! A prospectus is a preliminary description of a proposed dissertation. Her dissertation work investigates how F0, CoG of /s/, and speech rate correlate with gender presentation and sexuality for a group of women and assigned female at birth (AFAB) non-binary (NB) people.

Najoung Kim selected as keynote speaker

Professor Najoung Kim was chosen as a keynote speaker for the 10th Workshop on Representation Learning for NL (RepL4NLP 2025)! The event took place in early May and her talk was titled “What does it take to convince ourselves that a system is exhibiting compositionality?” You can read more about the conference at RepL4NLP 2025. […]

Congratulations to our 2025 graduates

This past weekend, we celebrated our undergraduate, master’s, graduate certificate, and doctoral graduates! Pictured left to right is Professor Neil Myler, recently graduated Dr. Lee-Ann Vidal-Covas, Professor Danny Erker, recently graduated Dr. Kevin Samejon, and Professor Kate Lindsey.

Andre Batchelder-Schwab awarded Lewis and Clark field scholarship

Congratulations to Andre Batchelder-Schwab, one of our PhD candidates who was recently awarded a Lewis and Clark field scholarship from the American Philosophical Society. He will use this funding to continue his research on a whistled register of the Kinande language! To learn more about the scholarships, see https://www.amphilsoc.org/grants/lewis-and-clark-fund-exploration-and-field-research

MorphoMO workshop in Montreal

At the beginning of May, Professor Neil Myler presented at MorphoMO, a workshop in Montreal. His talk was titled “The Spanish PYTA morphome dissolved”. He writes, “Many Romance languages exhibit a morphomic pattern dubbed PYTA (for {perfecto/pretérito} y tiempos afines—see especially Maiden 2018: Ch 4).  Spanish exhibits a striking instance of this phenomenon. No matter […]