GRAMMAR & VARIATION LAB MEMBERS

Maya Abtahian is an Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Rochester. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009 with a dissertation titled ``Language Shift and the Speech Community: Sociolinguistic Change in a Garifuna Community in Belize''. Maya works on language variation and change in the context of language shift and other social changes. She has fieldwork experience in Belize and Indonesia.

Nadine Grimm is an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Rochester, where she heads the Language Documentation and Description program. Nadine obtained her Ph.D. from Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany, in 2015. Her dissertation, ``A grammar of Gyeli'', received the Panini Award (2019) and the Bloomfield Award (2023). Her research takes place in a descriptive, documentary, and typological framework with a special focus on grammatical tone, language contact, and phonetic features in northwestern Bantu languages. Nadine has held language documentation grants by ``DoBeS'' on Gyeli (Bantu, Cameroon) and by ELDP on Ikaan (Benue-Congo, Nigeria).

Joyce McDonough is the Richard L. Turner Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Rochester. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1990. Her dissertation, ``The morphology and phonology of Navajo verbs'', was advised Emmon Bach and Ken Hale. She has held an NIH postdoc position in Peter Ladefoged's Phonetics Lab at UCLA (1991-1993) and visiting assistant professorships at the University of Montana and Ohio State University. In her current research, Joyce investigates the phonetic structure of endangered languages, especially systems with complex polysyntheic morphological structures, and the auditory representation of speech speech sounds with neuroscientist Laurel Carney

J.C. Wamsley is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Rochester. He received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 2023 with a dissertation titled “Topics in Hakha Lai Nominal Marking”. J.C. is a field linguist who works with speakers of the Chin languages and is a founding member of the Chin Languages Research Project. His research interests include Sino-Tibetan languages, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics.

Constanza is a Linguistics PhD student (class of 2026). She graduated from the University of Rochester where she completed a BA in Linguistics and a BA in Computer Science. She is interested in the description and documentation of endangered languages and its intersection with computational linguistics methods. She has been awarded an ELDP Individual Graduate Scholarship (2023-2026) to document women’s livelihoods in Huave [ISO huv], an endangered isolate language spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico. The data collected from her fieldwork trips will feed into her dissertation on Huave subordination and clause-embedding verbs.

Meghna Hooda (they/them) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Rochester. They hold a Master’s degree in Cognitive Science from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. Their primary research interests lie in the pragmatic and sociolinguistic features of Hindi varieties. They are also interested in using computational methods to explore spoken language data.

Yizhen is a Ph.D. student in the Language Documentation and Description Program. Her current interests include Hakka and Chinese dialectology.

Owoyele Oluwasegun Joseph is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Rochester. He holds an M.A. degree in Linguistics from Ekiti State University in 2017. He worked as an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Nigerian Languages at Ekiti State University, Ado-Ekiti, and the Department of Linguistics and Languages, Federal University Oye-Ekiti, Ekiti State, Nigeria, between 2018 and 2024. His research interests include phonetics, phonology, grammatical tone, and language documentation and fieldwork in Benue-Congo languages. His master’s thesis, Comparative Analysis of the Phonological Systems of Uhanmi and Ukue Languages in Akoko Southeast of Ondo State, compared the sound systems and phonological processes in two understudied languages of the Edoid language family.

Suganya is a PhD student in Linguistics (class of 2027) at the University of Rochester where she is a member of the Grammar and Variation Lab. She completed her MS in Applied Linguistics at Texas A&M University-Commerce where she wrote her thesis on Tamil heritage language maintenance and ethnolinguistic identity. She completed her first Qualifying Paper on discourse variation in Tamil and is currently working on her second paper on linguistic landscapes in the South Asian diaspora. 

Jess is a Linguistics PhD student (class of 2026). She is interested in ethnomusicology, language documentation and revitalization, with a focus on community-centered approaches. Currently, her research centers around the tone-tune relationship in traditional Tujia folk songs, a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in the Hunan Province of China. Jess is investigating questions such as: In a tonal language, does tone dictate melody, or does the melody influence the manifestation of tone?

Sreyoshi is a Master's student (class of 2024) in the Linguistics Program. Her interests lie at the intersection of phonetics, multilingualism, and sociolinguistics. Sreyoshi is currently a Research Assistant under Prof. Maya Abtahian, where she studies the variable deletion of the schwa vowel in Jakarta Indonesian. Prior to this, she obtained a Master's degree in English Literature. Outside of academics, she loves reading translated fiction, dancing, painting and drawing cartoons.

Becky is a Master's student in the ``Language Documentation and Description'' program (class of 2024). She is interested in the description and documentation of Bantu languages, with a focus on tone in nouns and verbal predicates, as well as contact between Bantu and Khoe languages. She has been awarded an ELDP small grant (2023-24) to document subsistence strategies in Tjhauba [ISO xkv], an endangered Bantu (S311) language spoken in northwestern Botswana. Prior to her first fieldtrip, she has already started to help the community with the construction of a community-generated website, sharing cultural, ecological, and linguistic information. Becky has also been involved in the Grammar and Variation Lab project on sociolinguistic variation in reference grammars. Together with Scott Kirshner, she presented the paper ``Towards a typology of sociolinguistic variation'' at the ALT 22 conference at Austin, Texas in December 2022. Becky joined the Ph.D. prohram at the University of California at Berkeley in 2024.

Suhasini is a Master's student (class of 2024) interested in sociolinguistics, multilingualism, and the Vietnamese language. Currently, she is working with Dr. Maya Abtahian to study the deletion of the schwa vowel in Jakartan Indonesian.

Scott is a Master's student (class of 2023) in the Linguistics Program. His research is focused on variation in the Rochester Jewish Community Oral History Project, a collection of oral history interviews from the 1970s. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, Scott is investigating associations between variation, ethnic identity, and connectedness to one's community.