Colin Hirschberg receives Dean’s Undergraduate Award

Colin Hirschberg, who received a BA in linguistics in Fall 2022, has been awarded a Dean’s Undergraduate Award for his thesis on “Restrictions on Mandarin bei-passives,” supervised by Professor Jess Law. Only 10 Dean’s Awards, which come with a $100 prize, are made in the Humanities Division each year. 

The WHASC Editor asked Colin to briefly describe what he discovered in his thesis research:

“This thesis examines Mandarin passive sentences, demonstrating that they have an additional requirement not shared with active sentences. Passive verbs must be marked for a change of state, though, this requirement seems to be relaxed when the subject describes a sentient individual, like a human. This work attributes the constraints on passives to a general notion of affectedness. An individual is affected when they undergo a change of state. Sentient individuals can undergo more types of abstract changes of state than non-sentient ones, so despite the ostensibly relaxed affectedness requirement, a passive sentence does express a change of state, just an abstract emotional one rather than a physical one like in. That passive subjects are more constrained by affectedness than the corresponding active objects not only refutes the meaning equivalence between active and passive sentences; this also reaffirms a longstanding observation in linguistics that the subject position is structurally prominent.”

Congratulations, Colin!