Graduate Students
Aaron W. Marks
Started: 2009
My area of interest is historical-comparative reconstruction and areal-contact linguistics, with a geographic focus on the Indigenous languages of the Americas. I am currently working on my doctoral dissertation, a description of the phonetics and phonology of the Wappo language of northern California, and since 2012 I have been involved in a language revitalization program with the Wappo community.
Bethany Lycan
Started: 2021 - Greenberg Fellow
My primary interests include usage-based syntax, typology, and language revitalization.
Bruno Pinto Silva
Started: 2022 - Greenberg Fellow
My main interests include the documentation and description of languages labeled “Creoles” and “Pidgins.” I am particularly interested in contributing to the description of the Phonetics and Phonology of these languages. For the last eight years, I have been working on Haitian Creole.
More info...
Jericho Wimborne
Started: 2019
Jericho is a PhD student with primary research interests in discourse, cross-linguistic taboo language, and communication in tabletop gaming.
Daejin Kim
Started: 2016
Research interests: Acoustic and Articulatory Phonetics, Laboratory Phonology, Prosody, Reduction, Native American Language
Danielle Angier
Started: 2023
My research interests are in syntactic and semantic change, specifically in terms of how diachronic evidence can be used to explain synchronic variation. I am particularly interested in identifying contexts for change and the mechanisms through which change occurs and leads to the variation we see today, following a usage-based, constructional perspective.
Daven Hobbs
Started: 2018 - Greenberg Fellow
My research interests are in cognitive and historical/evolutionary linguistics. For my dissertation I am building a diachronic corpus of texts in Tupi, an indigenous language of Brazil, to track changes in its morphosyntax over a period of roughly five centuries.
David Paez Acevedo
Started: 2013
My main interests are indigenous languages and Spanish varieties in Colombia. I am especially interested in the phonetic-phonological interface, and processes of grammaticalization. I am a Teaching Assistant of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
Debbie Wager
Started: 2010
I study discourse-level phenomena in American Sign Language. In some recent papers I have investigated discourse markers, conversational repair sequences, and mental spaces theory. I'm a TA in the Core Writing Program, teaching English 101 and 102.
Devin Tankersley
Started: 2020 - Greenberg Fellow
Devin is a researcher in the Lobo Language Acquisition Lab, working on topics related to phonological features of ASL and effects of language deprivation on neurodevelopment. His research interests also include documentation and analysis of Taiwan Sign Language, focusing on phonological patterns and lexical variation.
Frances Jones
Started: 2017
My research interests include language contact, language variation, and language documentation. My primary focus is on language use in New Mexico, which I explore by documenting and describing varieties of English in the state from a variationist sociolinguistic perspective, as well as analyzing language contact effects between English and Spanish in New Mexican communities.
Ivette S. González
Started: 2020
My research interests are in documentary linguistics and the revitalization of indigenous languages of California. I work in collaborative projects to document the Paipai language (Yuman, ISO code ppi) spoken in the peninsula of Baja California, Mexico.
Gonzalez, Ivette S. 2020. Paipai (Baja California, Mexico) – Language Snapshot. Language Documentation and Description 17, 150-157.
Jennifer Benson
Started: 2022
I am an internal medicine physician and teach patient-centered communication skills at the UNM School of Medicine. I have a strong interest in health literacy, discourse analysis and relationship-building between clinicians and patients.
Jens Van Gysel
Started: 2017 - Greenberg Fellow
I am working on a documentation and grammatical description of the Sanapaná language of Paraguay. In addition, I am interested in language variation and change in contexts of endangerment. I've also worked on prof. Croft's computational linguistic UMR project.
Joonyeop Baek
Started: 2016
My main research areas are Cognitive Semantics and Pragmatics. I am interested in studying the conceptual structures of our mind within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. To be more specific, I want to find out how the implicit conceptual systems such as metaphor, mental spaces, viewpoints influence our thinking process, and how they are disclosed in our language uses.
Lukas Denk
Started: 2016 - Greenberg Fellow
My areas of research include typology, morphosyntax, morphological complexity and the interplay between lexicon/lexicalization and grammar/grammaticalization in verbal complexes, specifically in Navajo and Athabaskan languages. I am generally interested in historical and usage-based explanations for linguistic phenomena that have not yet been provided by functional approaches.
Mariana Willenbrink Marchesi
Started: 2020
Originally from Argentina, Mariana is currently pursuing a PhD in Linguistics. She has an MA in TESOL, and her research focuses on children's acquisition of minority languages. She is currently investigating child heritage speakers' production of demonstratives in Spanish and English.
Meagan Vigus
Started: 2016 - Greenberg Fellow
As a recipient of the Greenberg Fellowship, I am interested in understanding the cognitive underpinnings of language through the analysis of typological data. My research focuses mostly on verbal semantics, argument structure, and argument structure alternations in a cross-linguistic perspective. I'm also involved in the Uniform Meaning Representation project.
Motomi Kajitani
Started: 2008
I am interested in cognitive pragmatic analyses of discourse markers from crosslinguistic perspectives. My current research topics are interactions among exemplification, hedging, topic management, stance, and mirativity.
Rachid Lazhar Saghrouni
Started: 2010
In my dissertation research, I seek to determine how preschool-aged, Tunisian Arabic-speaking children learn to use their morphologically complex verbs productively. By viewing the emergence of linguistic productivity as a tradeoff between computation and storage, I seek to demonstrate that the controversial dichotomous characterization of productivity as either gradient or categorical is a fake dichotomy.
Ryan Smith
Started: 2017
I am primarily interested in gesture studies and cognitive neurophysiology. My research focuses on motor processes related to semantic processing, gesture production, and recognition of object affordances. My current project focuses on the entrainment of motor dynamics for the production of prosody and manual gesture.
Samuel Melada
Started: 2022
I am a Neuroscience Nurse Educator at UNM hospital, and I am particularly interested in the neuro anatomy of language. I am also very interested in Discourse Analysis related to healthcare and how medical ethics are discussed and the ways in which patients interact with the healthcare system and nurses, doctors and other healthcare providers.
Sarah Lease
Started: 2022 - Greenberg Fellow
In my research, I draw on usage-based approaches and acoustic methods to study language acquisition and variation among Spanish-speaking children and adults. Within this, I am mostly concerned with understanding the extent to which the cumulative usage of words in specific contexts shapes production and lexical representation.
More info...
Sean Lundergan
Started: 2023 - Greenberg Fellow
I'm interested in sociophonetics, phonetic and phonological variation, and dialect contact. I've previously studied leveling of regional vowel features in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Sharifa Bahri
Started: 2018
I study the bilingual brain. I am fascinated with how bilinguals process and produce languages in conversations with other bilinguals speaking the same languages. I focus my research on bilingual Saudi Arabians who are fluent in Arabic and English. In my free time, I travel and share some of my adventures online — it’s fun being a traveling linguist!
Alec Goldberg
Started: 2023
My research interests are in the semantics and morphosyntax of the Navajo language. I have been awarded the Navajo Language Program’s Robert W. Young Scholarship. I have earned a BA in linguistics from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a BFA summa cum laude in art studio from UNM.
Cormac League
Started: 2022
cleague@unm.edu
I earned my B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Southern California. I am interested in empirical research on phenomena of prosody and codeswitching. I work with Uto-Aztecan and Athabaskan languages. Since moving to New Mexico, I have been studying Navajo and assisting in community-based language revitalization work.
Eliza Forrest
Started: 2023
Eliza is an MA student in Linguistics. Their interests are at the intersection of sociolinguistics, disability studies, and accessible design. They are the lab manager of the Lobo Language Acquisition Lab where they work on educational outreach projects that focus on language diversity and linguistic bias.
George Strohl
Started: 2022
I have BAs in Anthropology, Linguistics, and Russian. My interests include Linguistic Anthropology, Sociolinguistics/Sociophonetics, Second Language and Dialect Acquisition, and Social Identity Construction through speech and narrative. I plan to study the construction of local and national identities in Atlantic Canada. In the future, I would like to study Second Language Acquisition and its affects on social identity amongst English-speaking learners of Russian and Russian-speaking learners of English.
Holly Wilson
Started: 2022
I received my undergraduate degree in Celtic Studies I am interested in language documentation and revitalization and language change.
Isaac Brown
Started: 2023
Isaac Brown earned his BA in Linguistics (minor: Honors Interdisciplinary Studies) and his BA in Languages (French & Russian) at UNM in 2020. His research interests include semantics, morphosyntax, typology, and translation processes. He also has a keen interest in East Asian languages’ orthographies and the educational merits of constructed languages.
Jadin Moore
Started: 2023
I have a B.A. in Linguistics from UNM, my main research interests are language documentation, queer sociolinguistics, and L2 learning of minority languages by heritage speakers, particularly as all of the above relate to phonetics/phonology. I speak English & Spanish and work primarily with Oklahoma Cherokee.
Jing Yang
Started: 2022
My research interests include semantic, cognitive linguistics and computational linguistics.
Jose Manuel Gonzalez Izquierdo
Started: 2021
Jose Manuel, originally from Mexico City, graduated from Texas State University in German and Music. He is studying a Master’s in Administrative Studies at Missouri State University. His interests are sound design, audio engineering, ambisonic recording techniques, and comparative research between music and linguistics. At the University of New Mexico, he will focus on the acoustic features of Mazatec and its whistled language.
Kelly Knupp
Started: 2022
I hold a BA in languages from UNM studying Spanish, German, and Arabic. My principal interests are variationist sociolinguistics and language variation and change across phonetics/phonology, morphosyntax, and lexicon. I am also interested in, language contact, dialectology, Hispanic linguistics, and L2 pedagogy. I speak fluent Spanish and German, and conversational Arabic.
Seth Wyatt
Started: 2022
My main research interests are Cantonese linguistics and both phonology and prosody across tonal languages in general. I am also interested in documentation and dialectology in the languages of West Papua, Micronesia and the American Southwest.
Wil MacNeil
Started: 2022
My research interests are in viewpoint constructions in co-speech gesture with a specific focus on gesture in stand-up comedy narratives. I also dabble in sociophonetics and metaphor from a cognitive point of view.
