LING001: Teaching Assistants   (Fall 2015)

Edward "Tad" Bezerra Hi, I'm Tad! I'm a second year graduate student from Providence, RI. I did my undergrad and University of Rochester in upstate New York, My background is in historical linguistics, language change, phonology, and morphosyntax - I have done work reconstructing proto-forms of Amazonian languages as well as experimental work in syntax and morphology. I am interested particularly in the way that language changes over time, how certain aspects of language are processed in the brain, and how the latter might affect the former. I'm currently doing research through the variation and cognition lab into the connection between various types of priming and memory. In my free time, I love singing, skiing, reading books, and playing videogames.
Nattanun "Pleng" Chanchaochai Hi, I’m Pleng. I’m from Bangkok, Thailand. I did my undergrad at Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University and my master’s in clinical linguistics at University of Potsdam (Germany), University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu, and University of Groningen (the Netherlands). My main research interest is on language disorders. I have worked with aphasic and autistic population with regards to grammar and pragmatics, respectively. I’m also interested in semantics and general Thai linguistics. I love different cultures and languages but somehow when it comes to food, I prefer Thai food (or at least something super spicy). I love cooking for my friends and family. Traveling is also my passion. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the course or the student life in general. :)
Taylor Jones Hi I'm Taylor Jones. My research interests are (un)healthily eclectic. Recent research includes applying historical linguistic methodology used in the reconstruction of Vulgar Latin to so-called "Black Twitter", an attempt at a unified description of the dialect geography of African American English (AAE), an investigation of consonant and syllable reduction in spoken Mandarin, an analysis of how Rachel Dolezal attempted to construct "black" identity lingustically, an investigation of changing approaches to negation in AAE, and a look at how Californians are using "fleek" differently than everyone else. I also do work on (evolutionary) game theoretic approaches to pragmatics and to modeling language change, and am looking at cycles of slang and euphemism as well as an investigation of "microaggression" as a Bayesian Signaling Game. Outside of linguistics, I love martial arts and music, and am a recovering professional jazz musician.
Milena Šereikaitė

I am Milena, a second year graduate student in Linguistics at UPenn. I have gained my educational background in English linguistics in Europe and moved here a year ago from Lithuania. My research interests mostly are in Syntax and Morphology, Baltic and Slavic linguistics. I have spent a lot of time working on Lithuanian passives and impersonal constructions looking at different Voice projections and comparing them with cognate patterns from Polish and Ukrainian. Slavic prefixation is another topic that recently caught my attention. Can Aspect be formed via prefixation? Can prefixes function like prepositions? How do prefixes influence the argument structure of a verb and how do they interact with other morphological elements? These are the questions that I am working on at the moment. In my free time, I like reading Russian and Japanese literature, going for a run and watching movies about vampires.