UNM Department of Linguistics

Meet Our Graduate Students

Catie Berkenfield is a Ph.D. Candidate in Linguistics. Her interests include language and gender, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis. Her recent work focuses on the notion of embodiment in language acquisition and metaphor theory, especially how critical and interdisciplinary perspectives on embodiment inform linguistic methodology and models. Catie's dissertation topic is "Constructing Gender and Ethnicity through Discourse Patterns: Sports Commentary in U.S. Professional Basketball and the Athlete as Social Subject."

James MacFarlane is a doctoral candidate in Linguistics. His research program focuses on the storage and processing of morphology and phonology in American Sign Language (ASL). He is currently working on a psycholinguistic investigation of the mental representation of classifier predicates in ASL as part of his doctoral dissertation. For more information please see his homepage.

Brenda Nicodemus is a doctoral student in Educational Linguistics. Her interests lie in the linguistics of American Sign Language particularly in relation to the psycholinguistics of interpretation. Among other topics, she has examined gender variation in interpretation, repetition in ASL discourse, acceptability of nonce signs among native users of ASL, and interpretation of ASL metaphor. Brenda has interpreted and presented at local, regional and national conferences and has taught in interpreter education programs in Indiana, Colorado and New Mexico. She is presently working on her comprehensive exam paper entitled "The Creation of Coherence in Deaf Life Story Narratives."

Dawn Nordquist is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Linguistics. She focuses on usage-based studies of language, looking at modals, second language production, and most recently elicitation. Her dissertation. "Elicited Language: Implications for Language Storage, Processing, and Production," analyses elicited language, compares its features with corpus data, and interprets the differences in terms of storage features of linguistic units.

We have more than 40 graduate students in linguistics. More bio information will be posted as it becomes available.