Left to right: Maddie Bloomquist, Løsha Baklanov, Lizzy Feng, Spencer Poggemann, Lu Liu
Løsha Baklanov has just completed an MA in Linguistic Theory and Language Description at HSE University in Moscow. He is particularly interested in areal linguistics, and especially language contact in Siberia and circumpolar areas, focusing on the distribution of nominal tense. He intends to work with Jessica Kantarovich on documentation, areal typology, and grammatical semantics.
Maddie Bloomquist earned her BA from Ohio State in 2023 and now returns to us with an MA in Forensic Linguistics from Pennsylvania Western University. Her most recent research is on radio tracers for investigating the neurology of Alzheimer's disease; her honors thesis focused on chatbots at the COSI museum exhibit. She now intends to collaborate with Dan Parker, applying her expertise on neuroimaging to investigate theories of syntactic processing in real time.
Lizzy Feng holds an MA in Applied English Linguistics from The Chinese University of Hong Kong where she did her thesis research on language attitudes and social meaning in the Ningbo-Fenghua region. She also did research involving the sociolinguistic dynamics of English in Hong Kong and helped work on the sub-databank of transcribed verbal communication data for the Sociolinguistic Corpus of Englishes in Hong Kong. Here at Ohio State, she intends to work with Joy Peltier and Kathryn Campbell-Kibler on ethnographic fieldwork and variationist studies.
Lu Liu graduated from UC-Santa Barbera with a double major in Statistics/Data Science and Linguistics. She has conducted research on Cantonese tonal coarticulation, on the role of functional load in historical phoneme mergers, and on the interaction of prosody and memory in American English. She intends to work with Cynthia Clopper to investigate lexical and individual-level factors affecting speech production and perception.
Spencer Poggemann has just earned his MA in Linguistics from San Diego State University with a thesis titled “Dialectal variation as a variable of Spanish verb inflectional complexity”. He is interested in investigating morphological complexity of different languages and language varieties, especially in Romance languages. He intends to work with Andrea Sims on information-theoretic morphology.