Interview with Ben Eischens

The WHASC Editors recently conducted a virtual interview with Ben Eischens, who earned his PhD in Linguistics from UC Santa Cruz in 2022 with a dissertation titled Tone, Phonation, and the Phonology-Phonetics Interface in San Martín Peras Mixtec. Following his graduation, Ben joined the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he currently serves as an Assistant Professor.

What kind of research are you working on at present?

Right now, I’m working on a bunch of different projects, each focusing on a different aspect of San Martín Peras Mixtec’s phonology and phonetics. These include the phonetics of phonation and nasality, diachronic sound change, the learning of lexical tendencies in a phonological alternation with lots of exceptions, and whether we can define the Mixtec ‘couplet’ in general phonological terms. I’ve been amazed at just how many different things there are to look at in a single language, and that the list just keeps growing with time.

Can you share a bit about your journey from UCSC to your current role at UCLA? Looking back, what was the transition from life as a graduate student to life as a faculty member like? Did you feel prepared for the transition? Was there anything unexpected that you faced?

It was definitely a big transition! I felt prepared by my time at UCSC for the teaching and research side of things — in some sense, you keep doing the same things, just on a larger scale. The strangest thing for me was that I still felt very much like a graduate student when I started at UCLA, but I suddenly had the role of a faculty member. Thankfully, my colleagues have all been extremely welcoming and supportive, so I feel like I belong in the UCLA Linguistics community.

Looking ahead, what are some of the future directions for your research? Are there new areas or questions in linguistics that you’re excited to explore?

On the more formal side of things, I’ve gotten interested in nasality, and especially in the relationship between its phonetic characteristics and phonological representation. I’ve also still got lots of work to do on the phonology and phonetics of phonation type in Mixtec, which can help us understand more about Silverman’s (1996) so-called ‘laryngeally-complex’ languages, where the same vowel can host orthogonal contrasts in both tone and phonation type. I also see myself doing more and more collaborative work in the future. There are just so many interesting questions to ask, and I don’t have the expertise to address them all. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I’ve been learning that it’s best to team up with others who have the necessary expertise so you can tackle the problem together.

What advice would you give to current UCSC graduate students who are aspiring to enter academia or pursue similar career paths?

My biggest piece of advice is to listen to your advisor. They have a good idea of what you need to do to get where you want to go, and they are genuinely invested in helping you get there. The other thing is to make sure you’re working on things that you enjoy. In my experience, the only way you’ll put in the amount of work needed to complete big research projects is if you get some satisfaction or happiness out of doing the research. That’s not to say it’ll always be fun, even if the topic is something you care deeply about. But you’ll get some fulfillment out of the process, and that can help you keep at it.

How has your research evolved since you graduated from UCSC? Are there any particular influences or experiences that played a major role in shaping your current research focus?

One aspect of my research that has grown (and still has lots of room to growǃ) is on the documentation/description side. I’m learning that there are so many ways to make my fieldwork data accessible and useful to the language community I work with, so I’m working on a number of projects to do that. My biggest influence in this has been the Mixtec community in CA. Members of the community are working in all sorts of different ways to make resources accessible in Mixtec, whether that’s through translation and interpretation, holding an after-school program in Mixtec for the children of Mixtec-speaking parents (see Centro Binacional’s Salinas webpage for info), or advocating for the labor rights of Indigenous migrant farmworkers in CA. While my research on phonation or tone might not immediately seem like it can contribute to this, it turns out that there are lots of ways that it can.