As we kick off the 2024-2025 Academic Year, we’re excited to welcome our new cohort of graduate students! Our four new first-years have shared introductions to help us get to know them better. Let’s dive in and discover their unique stories, interests, and what inspired them to join our program!
The coming of our new cohort and the new academic year marks another new start for SNARL. SNARL will continue offering a place where everyone is heard and seen.
Welcome to Rutgers Linguistics!
Colin Hirschberg
Hi, I’m Colin Hirschberg. I grew up in Fremont, California and completed a linguistics major and math minor at UC Santa Cruz in December 2022. I knew I was destined for linguistics when, in my foreign language courses, I started to inquire native speakers on the grammar rather than limit myself to the textbook and the lessons.
My research interests in linguistics have been scattered, but I am considering narrowing down to phonology. On the syntax-semantics interface, I explored, in my BA thesis, the semantic restrictions on passives and other externalizations (e.g., middles, nominalization, and clefts). Specifically, I used the notion of affectedness (the degree of change enacted by one event participant on another) to unify verb-type restrictions and thematic restrictions on Mandarin bei-passives and English get– and be-passives. In phonology, I developed, last year, an OT and AP analysis of Kazakh back and round vowel harmonies and hope to address what factors account for the variation in Kazakh’s frequency of roundness harmony.
Aside from linguistics, I enjoy studying Kazakh and other natural languages both at home and abroad. On the rare occasions when I manage to separate myself from linguistics and languages, I garden, jog, go hiking, travel, and revisit math proofs.
Yanzhen Huang (Catherine)
I’m a first year PhD in the linguistics department. I am interested in degree semantics, event semantics, acquisition, and computational linguistics. I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Bachelor’s degree in Statistics and Machine Learning. Then I got a Master’s in Theoretical Linguistics at Georgetown University. Outside of work, I have many hobbies. I enjoy dancing, hiking, climbing, reading, watching movies, listening to music, going to various shows and art museums. I am currently taking hip hop lessons. I am excited for the winter to come so I can learn snowboarding. I love trying new things and temporarily adopting my friends’ hobbies, particularly activities that help me stay active as a PhD student.
Siyuan Cao
Hello everyone. I am Siyuan, and I come from a very small county in east China. I was an English major during my undergraduate study in Nanjing University, where I learned a lot about literature and little about linguistics. Starting from then, I have found myself to be very engaged in systematic formalization, and I later went on to study as an master of logic at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) from the University of Amsterdam.
My primary research focus is semantics, though my interest in general linguistics was initially aroused by syntax. I did my master’s thesis on a particular wh-indefinite in Mandarin using a logical framework from my supervisors, Maria Aloni and Marco Degano. My thesis explored its epistemic indefinite uses and its dual role as both an indefinite and a question word.
Besides linguistics, I am a theater person (though have basically not attended any performances in the past year), a movie lover (though have not watched any recently), and a gamer (though stopped playing any other game ever since I started Splatoon 3).
Krishna Pulipaty
Hello, my name is Pulipaty Krishna Chaithanya. (Telugu speakers have their surname at the beginning, so my given name is Krishna Chaithanya. Please call me Krishna.)
I would like to pursue my research in syntax at Rutgers. I am also interested in morphology and semantics. Outside of linguistics, I love literature, especially novels and poetry. I like to read literature in both sets of languages – the ones that I know pretty well and those that I am starting to learn now. I am also very interested in politics and history and try to find time to read in them too.
I love nature and don’t want to lose an opportunity for a nice hike or walk in the middle of it. I am looking forward to making the most of my stay in the United States by exploring the unique elements of nature around here.
I was born and grew up in India. For my undergraduate in Osmania University (in Hyderabad, India), I studied Electronics and Communications Engineering with a few courses taken in Computer Science. Then I started working in IT services industry. In my early 20’s, I moved to Australia for my IT work and lived there since. Now I am excited to be in the US to study theoretical linguistics.
I only spoke Telugu until I was 17 or so. I grew up in rural India and went to a school where the medium of instruction was Telugu. When I moved to Hyderabad, a big city in the area, for my undergraduate, I became very interested in learning other languages. I slowly taught myself English and Hindi/Urdu. I was intrigued by the Perso-Arabic script of Urdu found on signs and shop names in Hyderabad and decided to learn Urdu seriously. Later, I came to be fascinated by ancient Indian history and started teaching myself Sanskrit.
Though I was still interested in languages and always wanted to do something about them, I hadn’t got an opportunity to study them in a university in my 20’s. Then, I decided to take courses in linguistics in the University of Melbourne part-time while working in IT full-time. Finally, I completed my Graduate Diploma in Linguistics part-time over a few years. Now I am very glad to be at Rutgers to study theoretical linguistics full-time. I am looking forward to making a good use of my stay at Rutgers to learn something and do something!