CLOTHIER-GOLDSCHMIDT DEFENDS MA THESIS

When not acting as LURC photographer, Scarlett Clothier-Goldschmidt found time, on June 2, to successfully defend her MA Thesis: The distribution and processing of referential expressions: evidence from English and Chamorro. Her committee was Matt Wagers (chair), Sandy Chung and Adrian Brasoveanu. The thesis was a broad investigation of how nominal expressions are mapped to argument positions, both as a function of morphological constraints (Chamorro’s person-animacy hierarchy), incremental processing principles (English relative clause processing), and discourse goals and functions (an analysis of blogposts in terms of Centering Theory). It draws upon diverse sources of evidence, including Chamorro-to-English translations of bible verses, a reading time study, and an annotated corpus of blogposts. The committee praised the research for its thoughtfulness and intellectual breadth.