Humanities Fellowships Awarded to Linguistics Graduate Students

The outstanding research of several graduate students in Linguistics was recently recognized by the Humanities Division.

Fifth-year PhD students Jack Duff and Morwenna Hoeks were each awarded one-quarter Dissertation Completion Fellowships for the 2023-2024 academic year. Jack’s dissertation, “On the timing of pragmatic inferences in comprehension,” profiles how narrative conventions like prototypical cause-and-effect plot structure invite readers to draw inferences that go beyond what is said in a text and explores how the reader’s path to those inferences is mediated by the external pressure facing them as they read. Morwenna’s dissertation, “Alternatives in context: Investigations on the processing of focus,” uses the interpretation of focus—a grammatical device all languages have for highlighting important information—to build psycholinguistic theories of language comprehension and prediction.

In addition, the Humanities Institute (THI) awarded summer research fellowships to fourth-year PhD student Vishal Arvindam and second-year PhD student Jonathan Paramore. Vishal’s award will support travel to India this summer to perform fieldwork for his dissertation, “Processing of anti-local reflexives in Telugu.” Jonathan’s award will support his travel to Pakistan to perform fieldwork for a research project on nasalization in Punjabi and Mankiyali.