LINGUISTIC INSTITUTE REPORT

Jeff Adler and Jed Guevara attended the LSA’s 2015 Linguistic Institute, which was held July 6-31 at the University of Chicago. Here are their reports:

Jeff:

The LSA Linguistic Institute was a fantastic time. The courses were intellectually engaging in introducing me to unfamiliar areas of linguistics. I took Computational Phonology, Intonational Phonology, Intro to Statistics with R, Word Prosody, and Intro to Morphosyntax (co-taught by UCSC alum Vera Gribanova). These courses were great, but perhaps the most exciting part of the LSA Institute was being introduced to the greater community of linguists. I spent many a late night discussing linguistics and whatever else with grad students and professors alike. Overall, attending the institute imparted to me a sense of the fun of doing linguistics.

Jed:

I had a fabulous experience at the LSA Summer Institute! I got to take courses that gave me a good primer on the subfields I’m interested in, like morphosyntax and psycholinguistics; courses that provided an overview of “hot” topics in the language family I work on (Austronesian); and courses that taught me skills I can incorporate into my own research, like Exploiting Freely Available Web Data for Linguistic Research and Generalized Additive Modeling. The Summer Institute was a good venue to network with professors and fellow grad students, to see what they are doing, and perhaps to make contacts for future collaborations. What better way to do all that than over wine, food, and live music? (Context: the reception after each keynote address had karaoke, a live band, finger foods, beer and/or wine!) Looking forward to the 2017 Institute. 😀