Current members

Luke Lindemann

 Membership: 2013-present

Luke Lindemann is a graduate student. He is from Austin, Texas and has worked on Texas German dialects for the University of Texas. He is currently looking at the semantics of split ergativity in Nepali. As a member of the YGDP, he is particularly engaged with the ongoing investigation into the Southern Presentative Dative (‘Here’s you a piece of pizza’) constructions.

Matthew Tyler

 Membership: 2013-present

Matt Tyler is a graduate student. His research is mainly in syntax, and he is interested in formal approaches to syntactic variation. This includes variation across dialects of US English, and variation within individual speakers. Constructions he has worked on recently are "have yet to", as in "John has yet to visit his grandmother", and "do got", as in "do you got any money?"

Randi Martinez

 Membership: 2017-Present

Randi Martinez is a graduate student. Her research interests are in syntactic variation and the syntax-semantics and syntax-pragmatics interfaces.  She has looked at the after-perfect construction and is currently working on the possessive relative that’s construction (`the book that’s cover is ripped’). 

Kaija Gahm

 Membership: 2018-present

Kaija is studying Ecology & Evolutionary Biology (Class of 2020). She has taken a few linguistics classes and loves learning about language. Currently, she is working with the YGDP to clean and manage survey data for future analysis and inclusion in a database.

Elena Kallestinova

 Membership: 2018-present

Elena’s academic background is in linguistics, and she now serves as Assistant Dean for Writing in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and as the Director of Graduate and Postdoctoral Writing for the Center for Teaching and Learning.

Serena Puang

 Membership: 2018-Present

Serena is a sophomore at Yale College, studying Linguistics, and she is interested in code-mixing and language acquisition. She is currently serving as Vice President of the Yale Undergraduate Linguistics Society.

Shayley Martin

 Membership: 2018-Present

Shayley is a sophomore at Yale College, studying Linguistics. Her research focuses on Appalachian English. She is currently investigating the phenomenon known as relative where.

Kento Tanaka

 Membership: 2018-Present

Kento is a senior at Yale studying Linguistics and East Asian Studies. He is currently working on the “try get” construction in Hawai’i English.

Ziyan (Heidi) Lei

 Membership: 2018-Present

Heidi Lei is a high school senior at Choate Rosemary Hall. She is an International Linguistics Olympiad medalist. The construction she has been working on recently is get my X on.

Josephine Holubkov

 Membership: 2019-Present
Josephine Holubkov is a first-year at Yale College who plans to major in Linguistics. She is interested in the cognitive effects of multilingualism and how we perceive people based on their dialects. She currently serves as the NACLO Chair of the Yale Undergraduate Linguistics Society. 

Lydia Lee

 Membership: 2019-Present

Lydia Lee is a first-year who was inspired to apply to Yale because of the YGDP. She is from Southern California and is excited to continue exploring the field of Linguistics at Yale.

Liam Curtis

 Membership: 2020-Present

Liam Curtis is a first-year in Berkeley from Chappaqua, NY. He is a prospective Cognitive Science major, who is interested in cognitive linguistics and curious about the intersection of race and language. 

Oliver Shoulson

 Membership: 2020-Present

Oliver graduated in 2020 with a B.A. in Linguistics. His interests include synchronic/diachronic syntax, microvariation and linguistic typology. He is currently involved in all manner of things pertaining to YGDP including researching new topics, updating bibliographies and entries, and fine tuning the website.