The semester is upon us, and we’d like to re-welcome this year’s incoming batch of graduate students and 3 new post-doctoral research fellows!
Graduate Students:
Colin Brown is interested in information structure and its interfaces, particularly in understudied languages. He completed his B.A. at the University of British Columbia.
Francesco Gentile’s main research interest is natural language semantics, with incursions into other areas such as phonology, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. He earned a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Nottingham, and completed an M.A. in Theoretical Linguistics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.
Jeffrey Lamontagne‘s main interests lie in sociophonetics and sound change, from perceptual, articulatory and acoustic perspectives. He has just completed his M.A. in Linguistics at the University of Ottawa.
Betty Leung is interested in first language attrition, online language processing, and computational linguistics. She studied Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Simon Fraser University.
Dejan Milacic is interested in syntax, semantics, pragmatics and their interfaces. He majored in Cognitive Science at Carleton University in Ottawa.
Pauline Palma‘s two main interests lie in theoretical morphology and in second language acquisition, with a particular interest in syntax and semantics. She completed her B.A. in Linguistics at UQÀM.
Postdoctoral fellows:
Lauren graduated from Harvard in May of this year and is excited to be
joining McGill’s department. Her research focuses on prosody and the
syntax-phonology interface at the sentential level. She works
primarily with data from Austronesian and Mayan languages. Her
specific research interests include prosodic diagnostics for syntactic
structure; the effect of prosodic constraints on word order variation;
and the representation of prosodic structure in the grammar. Her
dissertation “Prosodic Noun Incorporation and Verb-Initial Syntax”
develops a prosodically motivated account of pseudo-noun incorporation
with specific reference to Niuean. Although Lauren is a Hawks fan by
birth, she is glad to have a team to cheer for in the Eastern
Conference.
Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine inexplicably prefers to go by the name “mitcho.” He recently finished his dissertation at MIT, on interactions between the syntax/semantics of focus association and movement. Much of his work is on Mandarin Chinese, but he has also enjoyed investigating Atayal (Austronesian), Kaqchikel (Mayan), Japanese, and English. While at McGill, he will be working on his two current research areas: (a) the cross-linguistic syntax/semantics of focus, and (b) the interaction of movement with case, agreement, and voice. He looks forward to participating actively in McGill department life and collaborating with others.
Hadas recently defended her PhD dissertation in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. She completed her undergraduate studies in linguistics at Tel-Aviv University. Her research focuses on the syntax-semantics interface, and utilizes experimental and quantitative tools alongside traditional methods. More specifically, her work examines the interaction between competing operations in syntax and semantics, focusing on the domains of wh-questions, focus constructions, quantification, and degree semantics. Her dissertation studies the syntax, semantics, and processing of multiple wh-questions. She welcomes your recommendations for good middle-eastern grocery stores and Jewish delis in Montreal.
