Category: Student News

PhD students Myke Brinkerhoff and Maya Wax Cavallaro co-organized a session on “Engaging the Community: Using Field Methods Classes for Community Outreach,” with linguists at UC Santa Barbara, at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) in late January.

The organized session included presentations and discussions by current graduate students Jack Duff, Delaney Gomez-Jackson, Matthew Kogan, and Claire Miller Willahan, recent alumnus Andrew Hedding (PhD, 2022), Professor Maziar Toosarvandani, and their language expert collaborators Raúl Diaz, Natalia Gracida Cruz, and Fe Silva Robles.

A highlight of the organized session were two hands-on tutorials for creating computer games as a tool for language teaching and revitalization, led by Andrew, Jack, Matthew, and Myke, and a workshop on creating bi-/trilingual storybooks and audiobooks, led by Delaney, Jack, Maya, Myke, and Raúl.

The slides and materials from the event can be found on the organized session website.

Second-year linguistics undergraduate Andrew Kato wrote to the Editor recently, with an update on ongoing research on epicene pronouns in English and German. Andrew will be presenting the findings from this research at two upcoming undergraduate conferences:

I’m to present at Johns Hopkins next month and at Berkeley in April on research regarding ongoing phenomena in epicene (i.e., gender-indeterminate) anaphora in English:

• Fourth Annual Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium (March 24-25)
  “They/them/theirs: The morphosyntax and language reform of epicene pronouns in 21st-century Germanic”
• Seventh Annual Berkeley Undergraduate Linguistics Symposium (April 14-15)
  “Anaphoric relations in English epicene pronominalization: Language form and linguistic theory”

For additional information, I encourage you to briefly read my abstract for the upcoming Macksey Symposium below:

“In recent years, increasing consensus among English speakers for an inclusive pronoun regardless of gender has materialized in mainstream usage of “they” in singular contexts. Especially among situations in which the gender identity of someone is unknown or nonbinary, opting for “they” — referred to as an epicene pronoun — has increased in both written and spoken English. This development represents one of historically many in English, including the generic “he,” along with more recent neopronoun alternatives. The transition of defaulting to “they” represents an ad-hoc solution to a centuries-old gap in the morphological inventory of English — the absence of a pre-existing epicene-singular pronoun. Moreover, the current decrease of gender-assuming pronoun usage is not isolated. Rather, it falls within both overarching inclusive language reform in English as well as similar transformations in other Germanic languages. Importantly, how can these ongoing developments be grounded in linguistic theory, and how do they interface with morphosyntax and discourse? With this question in mind, this analysis connects the small but growing body of linguistic work on English epicene pronouns to current in-depth theories of anaphora, namely Government and Binding Theory and the more recent Minimalist Program, that have largely yet to be applied to the singular “they.” By relating these diachronic changes to additional Germanic languages such as German, Dutch, and Afrikaans, the phenomena in English epicenity (e.g. plural agreement despite singular antecedents, and mixed acceptability over “themself” versus “themselves”) can serve as a point of comparison extending beyond English itself.”

Exciting work, Andrew!

Lalitha Balachandran (PhD student) and Allison Nguyen (PhD student in Psychology and MA student in Linguistics) spent part of their summers working as interns for NASA. They had the following to report about their experiences:

Lalitha:

“This summer, I worked with a team of STEM faculty, scientists, education specialists, and administrators at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate to initiate a new program aimed at increasing partnerships between Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs), PhD-granting institutions, and NASA centers. We organized a community workshop to hear from folks at MSIs and other under-resourced institutions about barriers to participating in research. In addition to planning and preparing for the workshop, I also got to do some NLP analysis of NASA applications/proposals, demographic analysis of the workforce, and mapping of geographical regions (under-)supported by NASA’s research and educational programs. It was a fun mix of projects, and it was great to learn about NASA’s ongoing initiatives to support educational equity. Overall, I found it to be a really rewarding experience!”

Allison: 

“I spent part of my summer (remotely) working for the Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity (ODEO) at NASA Stennis Space Center (based in Mississippi). This was my second internship at NASA, and it was very enjoyable. As part of my job, I helped run an event celebrating Women’s Equality Day, collected some data on Stennis diversity initiatives, and gave a talk discussing how to approach incorporating equitable language into the workplace in meaningful, and actionable ways. I participated in Pathways Agency Cross-Center Collaborations (PAXC) and served as PAXC Center Chair for Stennis.”

Jonathan Paramore (far left) with other participants at a language documentation workshop at Allama Iqbal Open University

Jonathan Paramore, a second-year PhD student, spent part of the summer carrying out fieldwork in Pakistan. He had the following to report on his return:

“I received a THI Graduate Student Summer Research Fellowship Grant to (1) investigate the acoustic correlates to stress in Mankiyali and (2) help lead an International Training Workshop on Language Documentation at Allama Iqbal Open University in Islamabad, Pakistan.

“I spent almost three weeks in Danna, which is a remote mountaintop village in the Khyber Pakhtunkwa Province of Northern Pakistan. There are about 500 speakers of Mankiyali, and it is unintelligible to any of the surrounding languages. Interestingly, there was no access to the village by road until about 10-15 years ago, so it has remained relatively vigorous until recently. Unfortunately, now that the village has become more connected, the dominant language of the region (Hindko) is slowly taking over. Presently, about 20% of the village cannot speak Mankiyali, and the number is rising. I spent most of my time recording thirty different speakers reading a list of about 100 tokens embedded in carrier sentences. Each speaker was recorded twice. The target tokens are designed to analyze and compare the acoustic correlates of syllables in both stressed and unstressed positions. We are in the process of segmenting and annotating the data. Mankiyali is a specifically interesting case to analyze the acoustic correlates of stress because it has a weight-sensitive stress system with (at least) three levels of weight: CVV > CVC > CV. It is unclear where the syllable types CVVC and CVCC land in the hierarchy, so the experiment analyzes stress with the null hypothesis that the language has a 5-way stress hierarchy: CVVC > CVV > CVCC > CVC > CV. The main two questions being asked are a) what are the acoustic correlates to stress in the language generally and b) do different syllable types utilize different phonetic correlates to communicate the presence of stress?

“I also spent five days in the capital of Pakistan at Allama Iqbal Open University helping to lead a training workshop on language documentation. There were about 40 participants consisting of professors and PhD students from universities around Pakistan who came to participate. We taught the basics of using recording equipment, ethics, archiving data, what to record, etc. Many of the participants are mother-tongue speakers of endangered languages in Pakistan, and they were excited to learn techniques for preserving their languages. The workshop seemed to be a success, and it certainly raised awareness for the importance of language documentation in Pakistan. A couple of advisors to the Prime Minister even made appearances to promote the workshop.”