Welcome incoming graduate students!

Emma Custer (she/her) is passionate about syntax and fieldwork, with a particular interest in argument structure in West African languages. She earned her B.A. in Linguistics from McGill University. Outside of linguistics, she enjoys cooking, playing the flute, and reading – ideally with a cat curled up on her lap

Hannah Katinsky (she/they) is primarily interested in syntax and fieldwork. She received her B.A. from Indiana University, where she worked on topics related to valency, nominal alignment, and information structure in South Central Tibeto-Burman and Korean. When not reading about theoretical syntax, Hannah enjoys running, cooking, and knitting.

Dawn Hei Yuen Lau is primarily interested in psycholinguistics, particularly in how bilingual speakers process scalar implicatures, formal logic, and all other things pragmatics. She’s also interested in comparing semantic acceptability across language backgrounds. She completed a B.S. double majoring in Linguistics and Cognitive Science, with a concentration in Computer Science at the University of Michigan. In her free time, she likes crocheting, travelling, creative writing, and anything related to cats. 

David Hultman is a new PhD student who primarily works on topics related to cross-linguistic syntactic variation, but is interested in a broad range of linguistic areas spanning from phonological and morphosyntactic theory to language documentation and historical linguistics. He completed a BA in Linguistics at Stockholm university after also having studied computer science and mathematics, and followed this up with an MA in Theoretical Linguistics from the University of Tromsø. Outside of linguistics, he enjoys reading, hiking, learning about botany and entomology, tinkering with typography and typeface design, and trying to learn new languages.

Bokai Liu

Bokai Liu is primarily interested in syntax, especially relative clauses and left periphery, and has worked on Gayogohó:nǫˀ, a Northern Iroquoian language. He completed his B.A. in Linguistics at Cornell University. Outside of academics, he enjoys architecture and cooking.

Kento Tanaka (he/him) is joining the MA program and is primarily interested in syntax. He is from Honolulu, Hawai‘i and received his BA in Linguistics and East Asian Studies at Yale University. He also worked in Hong Kong as an English teacher and in the nonprofit sector before coming to Montreal. He enjoys trying new foods, cooking, and hiking. 

My name is Varvara Tiutiunnikova, and I am a fieldwork semanticist. I’ve mostly worked on the topics of (in)definiteness, bare nouns, number marking, (pseudo)incorporation and scope. I finished Moscow State University, and during my BA I was doing fieldwork on Uralic languages spoken in Russia (Khanty, Mansi, Forest Nenets, and Karelian). My side interest is phonology–I also investigated stress and schwa alternations in Uralic. I enjoy music, cinema, chess and pilates. 

Alessio Tosolini (he/him) is a computational linguist working to bring linguistics back to natural language processing. He is primarily interested in low-resource speech technologies and the ways phonetic and phonological theory can create better speech-to-text for endangered languages, a topic he explored during a post-bac at Yale University. He has also conducted fieldwork on Triestin (Triestine Venetian), his heritage language, during his undergrad at the University of Washington. Linguistics aside, he enjoys traveling, playing board games (especially chess), making and solving logic puzzles, crocheting, and putting stuff on walls.

Seung Suk (Josh) Lee (he/him) works on corpus phonetics, prosody, and computational phonology. His main interest is studying how segmental realization is conditioned by prosodic structure in production and how it serves as a cue for prosodic structure in perception. He completed his BA degree at Indiana University Bloomington and recently received Ph.D. at UMass Amherst. His thesis, supervised by Kristine Yu, John Kingston and Mara Breen, is on the relationship between acoustic realization of laryngeal categories and prosodic structure in Seoul Korean. He plans to continue his investigation on acoustic correlates of prosodic structure in other languages using corpus data. Besides linguistics, he likes to watch (street) food documentaries, and watch soccer and (Korean) baseball.