Congrats to undergraduate Chandini White, who presented her summer research at the Fall Undergraduate Poster Forum! Chandini served as a research intern for Andrea Sims in Summer 2016, on a project that used grammatical descriptions to identify examples of defectiveness (missing grammatical forms of words). A goal was to broaden the range of data on defectiveness, in order to enrich the empirical foundation of theoretical models.
In her poster, “Missing word forms: Interpreting the connection across languages,” Chandini reported on the results of that work. Most interestingly, she found similar patterns of defectiveness in unrelated languages — perhaps suggesting a cross-linguistic tendency in what areas of inflectional systems are susceptible to defectiveness. This was her first research presentation, and it was a great success. Well done, Chandini!
In future work she hopes to look more at defectiveness in Dravidian languages.