END-OF-YEAR DEFENSES

The last week of the quarter saw a flurry of successful defenses:

• Steven Foley defended his second qualifying paper, “The Subject Gap Advantage in a split-ergative language: Reading time evidence from Georgian” (Matt Wagers, chair, Sandy Chung, and Ivy Sichel)
• Hitomi Hirayama defended her qualifying exam, “Expressing Ignorance in Japanese: Contrastive wa versus sukunakutomo” (Adrian Brasoveanu, chair, Donka Farkas, Ivy Sichel, and Junko Shimoyama (McGill))
• Maho Morimoto defended her qualifying exam, “Listener adaptation to lexical stress misplacement in English” (Grant McGuire, chair, Jaye Padgett, Matt Wagers, and Molly Babel (UBC))
• Jed Pizarro-Guevara defended his second qualifying paper, “An auditory masked priming study of nasal substitution in Dabaw Bisaya (Cebuano)” (Grant McGuire, chair, Jorge Hankamer and Brian W. Smith)
• Tom Roberts defended his first qualifying paper, “The semantics of responsive predicates and their complements in Estonian” (Pranav Anand, chair, Donka Farkas, and Jim McCloskey)