Thanks for the reply thousands. Your advice is helpful, and your experience is encouraging
cowgirl, I really appreciate that information. I'm hoping to spend most of August studying for the GRE. Thankfully, I'm a decent test taker, and I'm hoping to score as high as possible, even though from what I understand it's usually more of a weed-out factor than something that will tip the scales in your favor.
I really appreciate the reply. To address a couple things you pointed out:
my recommenders should be pretty strong (6 professors in the lang dep't reached out to me my during my last semester of undergrad, urging me to go to grad school, and many of them either wrote my law school recs or explicitly told me they'd write one if I went to grad school). Unfortunately, not all of them are linguistics-related, and idk how many are "big names" that will be known to the admissions committee, so that may be an issue
writing sample could be potentially strong, but will require significant edits or (in the case of certain departments) perhaps a new paper aligning more with my expressed interests.
As for some specific questions, to what extent should I mention interdisciplinary interests into my SOP? For example, although many of my interests are solely linguistics related, some of my interests overlap b/w law and linguistics, and I've thought about mentioning my interest In applying a potential advisor's work to a particular area of law (I feel this would also help explain the less than direct path to the Phd, like you mentioned), but I've also heard that interdisciplinary work is often ill-advised. Perhaps this is a case where I can reach out to profs beforehand and directly ask them how open they would be to this type of thing.
Thanks in advance