Welcome Kate, Omar and Aron

New faculty in phonology, syntax and semantics.

This year we are delighted to welcome three new faculty members, strengthening the department across the analytical gamut of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics: Kate Mooney, Omar Agha and Aron Hirsch. 

Kate earned her PhD from NYU in September 2023. Her work focuses on defining what core mechanisms are available to phonology, as opposed to syntax or morphology. For example in her dissertation, "The Theory and Typology of Phonological Reordering," supervised by Maria Gouskova, she argues that phonology itself, insofar as it applies to sounds, without morphological restriction, never fully transposes or reorders sounds. Before NYU, Kate went to the University of Chicago, majoring in Linguistics and working with Karlos Arregi.

Omar also comes to us from NYU, where he worked with Lucas Champollion on semantics and pragmatics, mostly in the modal and temporal domains. His dissertation, "How to Ignore Counterexamples: Homogeneity Across Times and Worlds," concerning the tolerance for exceptions exhibited by conditionals, habituals, temporal adverbs, and modals like "should". Omar also has a BA from Chicago, where majored in both Linguistics and Mathematics.

Aron comes to us from a postdoc at the Center for General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin, after getting his PhD from MIT Linguistics in 2017, and his BA in Linguistics from McGill in 2011. He works on syntax and semantics, their relation, and their interactions with pragmatics, prosody, and sentence processing. His dissertation,  "An inflexible semantics for cross-categorial operators," aimed to give a uniform meaning for only and and, despite the seeming diversity of the environments they inhabit.

We look forward to many years of fruitful teaching, research and collaboration with all three of our new Terrapins!