AN ALUM TELLS US WHAT HE HAS BEEN DOING

Alum Devin Tankersley (BA, 2011) provides this long-distance update about his MA-work in Taiwan:

I am in my 3rd and final year as MA student of the Institute of Linguistics at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, currently working on my thesis, a study of the overt pronoun constraint in L1 and L2 Taiwan Sign Language. The program has a strong emphasis on analysis and understanding formal theory, so I am grateful for my training at UCSC, which prepared me for independently seeking out research topics, writing clear and concise argumentation, and deep discussions on various topics. My research interests broadly include syntax-phonology interactions, formal approaches to tone sandhi and tone neutralization, and grammatical description of under-documented languages, including sign languages. I intend to continue on to a PhD in the future, with the goal of making linguistic study more accessible to speakers of endangered and minority languages, as well as making topics in sign language linguistics more mainstream and prominent in the field.