Visiting students
- Maria del Mar Bassa Vanrell (University of Texas at Austin) says: “My name is Maria del Mar but everyone just calls me Mar (‘sea’). I’m from an island, Mallorca (Spain), where I lived until I was 20. As an undergraduate I studied English literature and linguistics at the University of the Balearic Islands, The University of Texas at Austin, and Queen Mary University of London. After a year of teaching at The College of the Holy Cross, MA, I decided to move back to UT Austin to pursue graduate studies in linguistics. I’m currently working on the typology of motion constructions. My main interests are semantics, lexical-semantics, pragmatics, and syntax. I look forward to going deeper into any of these fields while at MIT. During my free time, I love traveling, photography, dancing, painting, watching movies, cooking (& eating), and just spending time outdoors while enjoying nature.”
- Brian Buccola (McGill University) says: “My research interests primarily include formal semantics, pragmatics, phonology, and computational linguistics. On the semantics/pragmatics side, I have worked on ignorance inferences associated with superlative numeral/scalar modifiers like “at least” and “at most”. On the phonology side, I have worked on the difference in generative capacity between Optimality Theory and ordered rewrite rules.”
- Heidi Klockmann (PhD student at Utrecht University) works on syntax, especially on case, agreement and numerals.
Visiting scholars
- Tony Borowsky (University of Sydney)’s research interests are all kinds of Theoretical Phonology including issues of lexical phonology in Optimality Theory, the formalization of phonological variation in OT and language acquisition.
- Hemanga Dutta (The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU))’s research explores different phonological theories. He also works on the sociolinguistics and linguistic aspects of Indian languages including language change, language contact, language, power and gender dynamics, language and youth culture, multilingualism, language and education. In addition, he is also interested in applied linguistics, language pedagogy and language disorders.
- Miwako Hisagi (MIT)’s research interests are Speech and Language Processing, Speech Processing, Acoustic Phonetics, Language Acquisition, and Phonetics.
- Masuyo Ito (Fukuoka University) works on first language acquisition, syntax, psycholinguistics and pragmatics.
- Jinglian Li (Beijing Institute of Technology)’s fields are Generative Grammar and Contrastive Linguistics.
- Aijuan Liu (Beijing University of Chinese Medicine) says: “[My] research interests include age effects and maturational constraints in second language acquisition, L2 acquisition of formal aspects of language knowledge (especially morphology and syntax).”
- Chie Nakamura (University of Tokyo)
- Tamina Stephenson (University of Massachusetts Amherst)’s research interests are pragmatics, semantics and philosophy of language.
- Tsuyoshi Sugawara (Ube National College of Technology) writes: “I am a spontaneous and an extrovert person. I love Boston because of its diversity. I am crazy about Boston Red Sox and Boston Celtics. I hold two degrees: Master of Education in Teaching English as a Second Language and Ph.D in Information Science (on Linguistics). As a linguist and a TEFL instructor, I am extremely curious about every language. I have been studying 12 languages (Arabic, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Russian, Turkish, Hindi, Malay, Chinese, and Korean), communicating every day with my friends from about 50 countries around the world. My research areas are Lexical Semantics (especially on Generative Lexicon Theory), Morphology, Syntax, and Language Acquisition ( Bilingualism, Trilingualism, and Multilingualism).”
- Aline Villavicencio (Institute of Informatics, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul) reports: “The main goal of this visit is to collaborate with Prof. Berwick on the project Cognitive Computational Models of Natural Languages for Assessing Language Competency (CNPq-MIT) to investigate particular linguistic factors connected to language use in clinical and non-clinical conditions, such as aphasia and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). ”