A warm welcome to this year’s cohort of new graduate students as well as Luisandro Mendes de Souza, who is visiting us from Brazil. Here’s what they have to say about themselves:

• Carissa Abrego: “I come to Chicago after living in sunny Southern California for 21 years. My undergraduate years were spent first at UCLA and later Biola University, where I earned her B.A. in a self-designed Human Communication major in May 2008. My research interests lie in historical lx and sociolinguistics, syntax and pragmatics, and linguistics and literature. My “other” interests include musicology, 20th-century English and Spanish literature, going to concerts, and watching college football and basketball games.”
• Rebekah Baglini: “I grew up in Philadelphia and attended Bryn Mawr College, where I studied linguistics and philosophy. I am particularly interested in the syntax and semantics of Mandarin Chinese, the syntax-phonology interface, psycholinguistics, language contact, genetic linguistics, and language documentation.   My non-academic interests include backpacking internationally, photography, cooking, documentary films, and writing fiction.”
• Timothy Grinsell: “I graduated from Dartmouth College with degrees in cognitive science and Russian, and then I received a masters in logic from Carnegie Mellon.  I’m interested in semantics, formal pragmatics, and the philosophy of language.  Within these areas, I’ve worked on negation, aspect, modality, and context-dependence. “
• Jonathan Keane: “I got my BA in linguistics from the University of Florida. I’m interested in Syntax, morphology, and computational linguistics.”
• Martina Martinovic: “I studied Croatian language and literature & Phonetics at the Faculty of Philosophy, the University of Zagreb. My degree would be the equivalent of a Master’s degree. Phonetics is a separate field of study in Croatia, and it incorporates basically anything and everything that has something to do with voice, speech, rhetoric, speech and hearing pathology, etc. I did course work and research in different fields that have “real” voice and speech as a point of departure -neurophonetics, speech and hearing pathology, South Slavic accentology and dialectology. Through that, my interests have narrowed down to linguistics, with phonetics and phonology as fields of concentration, which I am hoping to supplement with knowledge from cognitive linguistics.”
• Patrick Rich: “I recently graduated from the College with majors in Linguistics and French. I am coming back this year to complete a Master’s in Linguistics. His interests include Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics, Romance and Germanic languages, Balkan/Caucasian languages, and language acquisition.”
• Luisandro Mendes de Souza: “I’m PhD student at State University of Santa Catarina, Brazil (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina), my dissertation proposal is on the semantics of canonical comparative sentences in Brazilian Portuguese. I’m also interested in the syntax of comparative structures and Pragmatics.”
• Julia Thomas: “I received an M.A. in French Linguistics from Indiana University in Bloomington.  I am interested in pursuing work on language contact and sociolinguistics, in general.  I am particularly interested in studying Michif. I am excited to join the department!”

Besides our new students, joining the faculty this year is Karlos Arregi. Karlos got his Ph.D. at MIT in 2002. His interests include syntax, the syntax-semantics, syntax-phonology interfaces, and morphology; he also specializes in Basque and Romance Linguistics.

Anastasia Giannakidou and Suwon Yoon will be presenting “Metalinguistic Functions and the Expressive Dimension: Expressive Comparatives in Greek and Korean” at Sinn und Bedeutung 13 in Stuttgart (Sept 30-Oct 2).