Incoming First Years
The department is excited to welcome five incoming students next year: Ian Carpick, Richard Wang, and Sebahat Yağmur Kiper (PhD track) and Larry Lyu and Duygu Demiray (MA track). Their bios are attached below. Welcome, everyone!
Ian Carpick holds a BA in Linguistics from the University of British Columbia. His main interest is in the architecture of theoretical frameworks such as Optimality Theory, as well as theoretical phonology more generally, and long-distance interactions. His undergraduate thesis surveyed approaches to non-local dissimilation of nasal + obstruent clusters in the Austronesian languages Mori Bawah and Timugon Murut, and the Australian language Gurindji.
Duygu Demiray holds a BA in Linguistics from Boğaziçi University. Their research interests cluster around psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and theoretical linguistics. Their BA thesis, “Estimating the Effect of Uninformed Responses: Application of an MPT Model,” applied a Bayesian MPT model on sentences processing results from Turkish to explore the effects of uninformed responses on experimental results.
Yağmur Kiper received a BA in Foreign Language Education and an MA in English Language Teaching from Middle East Tech University. Her main interest is in theoretical syntax. Her MA thesis, “In the Case of Sluicing,” sought to build unified analyses of sluicing in Turkish regardless of the clause type.
Larry Lyu is completing a BA in Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His interest in the interaction of phonology and phonetics with historical linguistic theory and historical data has led him to explore diachronic sound change and high vowel fricativization in such languages as his native Nantong. In his free time, he collaborates with various activist groups on the documentation and revitalization of endangered languages.
Richard Wang is currently pursuing a BA and MA in Linguistics from UCLA. His interest in phonetics has led him to explore the phonetic cues to prosodic structures across languages, and his research in phonology has used OT to investigate the prosody of rhotic lenition in Mandarin. He would like to perform fieldwork on prosody, especially in the American Indigenous languages, Austronesian languages, and understudied Chinese varieties.