WELCOME TO OUR FIRST-YEAR PhD STUDENTS
The UCSC Linguistics Department is excited to welcome six PhD students as they embark on their first year of the program:
Vishal Arvindam completed his Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics and Psychology at UMass Amherst. He then worked for a year as the lab manager of the Child Language Lab at New York University led by Dr. Ailís Cournane. He is primarily interested in psycholinguistics, especially how structure is built and meaning is composed in real time. He is also interested in syntax and semantics more broadly, computational modeling, and the Dravidian languages spoken in South India. Fun fact: Outside of linguistics, Vishal enjoys playing guitar, collecting houseplants, shopping at the farmer’s market and going on long bike rides.
Lalitha Balachandran completed her undergraduate degree in Linguistics with a computing specialization at UCLA. She then served as Colin Phillips’ lab manager at UMD. She is interested in psycholinguistics, with a focus on the link between structure and meaning in online language comprehension, and also hopes to work in semantics, pragmatics, and information structure. Her past work has used data from English and German. Fun fact: Lalitha is a classic car enthusiast, and her car is nearly twice as old as she is.
Mykel Brinkerhoff received a BA in Linguistics from the University of Utah alongside a minor in German and German Literature, and completed his MA at UNC Chapel Hill. His current interests lie in phonology and its interfaces with other portions of the grammar. He has worked on Welsh (in his MA thesis on the allomorphy of the definite article), Italian, and German, and recently has been focused on Old Norse, other North Germanic languages, and the Celtic languages. Fun fact: Among a rotating host of hobbies, Mykel has recently been interested in bookbinding and genealogy. He and his wife are also expecting their first child on November 1st, and are excited for the challenges and joys that come along with parenting (not to mention observing language acquisition in real time).
Dan Brodkin completed his undergraduate degree in Linguistics at Carleton College, and joins us after a Fulbright research fellowship in Indonesia. He is interested in syntax and the syntax-prosody interface; for instance, how language-specific and universal prosodic constraints might mediate correspondences between underlying structure and surface word-order. He plans to continue working on Austronesian languages from Sulawesi, and perhaps also begin working on the Oto-Manguean family. Fun fact: Dan’s birthday is on February 29th, so he’s turning “six” in 2020.
Yaqing Cao earned a Bachelor’s degree in English at China University of Mining and Technology, and completed her Master’s degree in Linguistics at Northern Illinois University, in addition to a Master’s degree in Philosophy from Shandong University. She is most interested in semantics and pragmatics, especially experimental work on presupposition: she finds the layers of information within a sentence, as well as their interaction, fascinating. She currently works on Mandarin and Wenzhounese (a southern Chinese dialect that preserves a large amount of old Mandarin phonemes and prosodies) and is also planning to work also on Suzhounese. Fun fact: Yaqing enjoys reading novels. She also likes to work out and do yoga, and welcomes anyone in the department to join her!
Maya Wax Cavallaro studied Law & Society and Music History/Theory at Oberlin College, before moving to Guatemala and developing an interest in linguistics. She has since earned her MA in Linguistics at Cal State Northridge and spent the past two years working at Google as an Associate Linguist. Her interests span the subfields: from negation and irrealis mood in Tz’utujil (Mayan) to vowels in Massachusetts English. She’s also interested in community-based research and music and poetry in a fieldwork context, and hopes to keep sociolinguistics integrated with her work. In addition to Tz’utujil and MA English, Maya has worked with Unangam Tunuu/Aleut (Eskimo-Aleut) in the past, and hopes to work more with K’ichean Mayan languages and Yiddish. Fun facts: Maya is enthusiastic about punctuation, morphological innovation, and music: her instruments include the upright bass, viola da gamba, and flute! She also notes that, in answer to the frequent question, her work on Mayan languages is completely independent from her name (or fate, depending on who you ask).
Welcome, linguists!