New Graduate Students in 2012-2013

Relaxing after the welcome tour
(L to R: Phil Howson, Emily Clare, Becky Tollan, Michelle Yuan, Dan Milway, and Clarissa Forbes)

A belated welcome to our incoming graduate classes! Here is a little bit of information about each of our new MA and PhD students.

New MA Students

Emily Blamire has a BA in Linguistics from UBC, and has a broad range of interests, including language variation (sexuality, gender, taboo words, and slang), fieldwork, and psycholinguistic experimentation.

Clarissa Forbes is originally from Seattle, but has spent the last few years in Vancouver at UBC, getting a BA in linguistics. Language documentation and the languages of the Pacific Northwest are her two greatest linguistic interests. So far she has worked on Gitksan (Tsimshianic) and Blackfoot (Algonquian). Other research interests include syntax, morphology, and historical linguistics. Her undergraduate thesis was on Gitksan noun modification, arguing in favor of a class of adjectives.

Jada Fung completed her undergraduate studies a couple years ago here at U of T and is happy to be returning to this department as a graduate student. Her research interests include syntax, semantics, language change/variation and the Chinese language.

Phil Howson is from Vancouver and is primarily interested in phonetics and speech production. He is interested in Slavic languages, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean and Germanic languages. He also has an interest in syntactic theory, scrambling, and phonology, and phonetics.

Dan Milway did his undergraduate studies here at U of T. After a brief foray into chemistry, he earned his degree in German and Linguistics in 2009. For his MA, he will be focusing on morphosyntax; specifically he is interested in morphological case and Germanic particle verbs.

Rebecca Tollan is from North Yorkshire in the UK, and completed her undergrad at the University of York. Her main research interests involve theoretical and historical syntax, first language acquisition and processing of island constraints/A-bar movement. She is also interested in evolutionary linguistics, in particular the emergence of the human capacity for recursive grammar, and comparative-historical work.  

Michelle Yuan completed her undergraduate degree at U of T in Linguistics and German. Her research interests generally fall at the interface of syntax and semantics. She is especially interested in the left-periphery of the clause and the behaviour and functions of syntactic operators. Languages of interest include Inuktitut, Twic East (Dinka), and Mandarin.

New PhD Students

Majed Al-Solami  [maʒɪd] is from The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. His research interests are in phonetics and phonology in general. Specifically he is interested in the study of emphatics and post-velar sounds in Arabic.

Julien Carrier has a BA from UQAM and completed his MA there last year. He has worked on two varieties of Inuktitut: Tarramiut and Itivimiut, and plans to continue working on the morphosyntax of Itivimiut.

Emily Clare did a BA in Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MA in Phonological Development in Childhood at the University of York in the UK.  She is interested in acoustic phonetics, particularly human and machine speech recognition.  She hopes to research how speakers and listeners adjust in adverse listening conditions.

Julianne Doner just finished an MA in Linguistics here at U of T, after doing an undergraduate degree, also in Linguistics, at York University. She is interested in syntax, particularly the syntax of the inflectional domain. Her MA forum paper was entitled "A Typology of EPP-Checking Mechanisms," and considered how the EPP is checked in languages such as English, Niuean, Italian, Irish, and Arabic.

Shayna Gardiner did an undergraduate degree in linguistics and psychology at Queen's University, and wrote an honours thesis on Ottawa Valley English syntax.  She has an MA in linguistics from the University of Ottawa where she mainly focused on historical morphology and syntax. She did RA work on Old and Middle English and her major research paper was about Middle Egyptian lexical categories.  Her current interests and research are in the areas of morphology, syntax, historical linguistics, and Middle Egyptian.

Matt Pankhurst has an MA in linguistics from Western University and a BA in English Literature and Rhetoric. He has also holds diplomas in Chinese Language and East Asian Studies from the University of Waterloo, and a Chinese language certificate from Nanjing University. For his MA he did fieldwork on Spoken Manchu in Qiqihar.  His MA paper addressed a number of vowel-related processes in Spoken Manchu and the relevance of a diachronic approach to Spoken Manchu vowel harmony. He is interested in the phonology of languages in Northeast China, particularly rhotacization and prosody.

Kyle Weishaar is a first year PhD student. He has a BA from McMaster University in Cognitive Science of Language and an MA in Linguistics from the University of Toronto. His research follows two distinct paths. His primary interest is in the syntax-morphology interface in Romance languages. Specifically, he is interested in pronominal systems and agreement patterns in the Ibero-Romance languages in both Europe and in the Americas. His other area of interest is in the similarity between timing, or time keeping, in music and speech.