Welcome, Michelle!

Welcome to Michelle McKenzie!

Michelle is an undergraduate (majoring in Linguistics and Russian) who has begun working with Andrea to investigate the semantic properties of Russian and English derived words. In an earlier paper (“Lexical processing and affix ordering”, 2015), Andrea and Jeff Parker show based on corpus data that Russian derivational morphology has distributional properties that are indicative of high rates of decomposition during morphological processing — more so than for similar English derived words. Michelle plans to test predictions that these distributional facts make about the semantic transparency of derived words in each language. Are words with similar frequency profiles more semantically compositional in Russian than in English?

Watch this space for updates as the work progresses…