It was announced last week that graduate students Jeff Adler and Jed Guevara had received fellowships from the LSA to attend the 2015 Linguistic Summer Institute to be held at the University of Chicago this July.
We asked Jeff and Jed to describe their plans and hopes for the Institute and this was how they responded:
Jeff: I hope to spend the 2015 LSA Summer Institute filling in certain methodological gaps in my intellectual foundation. Specifically, I hope that courses such as Computational Phonology, Intro to Statistics with R, and Advanced Probabilistic Modeling in R can provide me with an understanding of how to use computational and statistical models to inform and shape phonological theory. In addition, I hope courses like Intonational Phonology and Prosodic Typology and Corpus Phonology will teach me some new skills, namely ToBi transcription, acoustic analysis of prosody, and corpus methods. The overall goal in taking such courses is to be able to incorporate these methodologies in my future research as a graduate student. Forming connections with other graduate students and faculty attending the institute is also a secondary, but highly desirable goal of mine. Hope to see you in Chicago!
Jed: I’m going to the Institute to generate research ideas and to learn new skills. As an aspiring Austronesianist/Philippinist, I’m really excited for Aldridge’s Topics in Austronesian syntax. I think it’ll provide me with a good theoretical foundation for core topics concerning languages in the family (verb initial word order, the robust agreement/voice system, and so on), and a good overview of what topics are currently considered “hot”. That should help me frame research questions of my own that can add to the current dialogue. I plan on building my schedule around this course. If schedule permits, I would really like to take Lidz’ Language Acquisition, Levy and Bicknell’s Computational Psycholinguistics, and Phillip’s The Psycholinguistics of Grammar. Taking Lidz’ class is a good opportunity for me to learn from an acquisitionist, and also to network with other linguists interested in language from a developmental perspective. I think the other two classes will be a good way for me to gain a better understanding of how theory, computational modeling, and linguistic data combine to further theoretical understanding. They will also help me generate more experimental project ideas that test/develop the theories that I will have absorbed in Aldridge’s course.