Several of the incoming first year students have sent us brief introductions.
mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine) grew up in Minnesota and is thus actively looking forward to the Boston winter. While at the University of Chicago he worked on the syntax/semantics of Mandarin comparatives. Since then, he’s lived in Taiwan and Japan, most recently working for Mozilla.
Hadas Kotek grew up in a small town in northern Israel. Hadas reports: “My name literally means myrtle and is a shortened version of Hadassah, the Hebrew name of the biblical queen Esther. I did a BA in linguistics at Tel-Aviv university, then studied the first year of my MA at the Humboldt university in Berlin and the second year back at Tel-Aviv university. My previous work focused mainly on formal semantics and its interface with syntax. At present I am planning to continue working in these same areas.”
Junya Nomura reports: “I’m from Japan. My main interst is in syntax. I’ve studied especially Japanese syntax, but I’m planing to study other East Asian languages such as Korean, Vietnamese, Thai and Khmer, too. Apart from linguistics, I like sports, especially basketball and baseball, and shogi (Japanese chess).”
Daeyoung Sohn reports: “I am from South Korea. I have an MA in linguistics, and BAs in international relations study and English. I am interested mainly in Syntax and also have interest in Semantics. ”
Yusuke Imanishi reports: “I was born and grew up in Nara, Japan. The city is not as famous and large as cities like Tokyo and Osaka. Nevertheless, it is filled with nature preserves, forests and temples/shrines!! We also have a big Buddha, which reaches the height of approx. 50m. I completed my MA in Linguistics at Osaka University in Spring 2009. My thesis proposes that dative subjects in the Standard Japanese and some Japanese dialects are structurally Case-assigned, opposed to traditional analyses. I also extended empirical coverage to other languages and attempted to devise a unified account of dative subject constructions. My research interests include syntactic theory and comparative syntax based on a macro/micro-parametric approach. I’m also interested in the interfaces of phonology and semantics with syntax.
Iain Giblin is from Australia. He reports: “My academic background is in music, but I’ve had a long interest in linguistics and in my postgraduate music studies I sought to apply generative models of language to music. I’m also interested in the philosophical questions that arise from the generative approach. I’m looking forward to the program here at MIT and learning all the techniques of modern linguistic theory so I won’t commit myself to one domain just yet. I still like to noodle around on the guitar and Boston is a great guitar town.”
Stay tuned for intros to the rest of the incoming class.