Welcome to Michael Sullivan! Michael is an undergraduate major in Linguistics. He is working with Bob Levine and Andrea Sims on his B.A. thesis project. For his thesis, Michael is developing a new, formal theory of the morphology-syntax interface and testing it on the relationship between passive and impersonal constructions in Croatian. Watch this space as the work develops!
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Welcome, Martha!
Welcome to Martha Johnson, a new Ph.D. student in the Linguistics Department!
Martha is interested in Bantu morphology and phonology. As a Fulbright Fellow to Tanzania she conducted fieldwork on Kihehe, adding to descriptive knowledge about the language. She is currently developing that work into a project on affix ordering in Kihehe verbs. Specifically, the order of subject agreement markers vs. TAM markers differs from the ordering in Swahili and other related languages, and seems to show variation. Martha is examining how this ordering has arisen as a result of morphologization of a former auxiliary as part of the main verb and resulting multiple exponence. She plans to return to Tanzania this summer for more fieldwork.
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…
Welcome, Chandini!
The Slavic Linguistics Lab welcomes its newest member, undergraduate Chandini White! Chandini will be a research intern in summer 2016, working with Andrea Sims on a project looking at the relationship between defectiveness and syncretism in inflectional systems. She will use reference grammars from a diverse range of languages to identify new data. She has already studied more than a dozen languages (mostly through self-study!), and the project will let her put those grammar sleuthing skills to work.
Chandini plans to study linguistics and Russian at Ohio State, and her current research interests include language contact, sociolinguistics, language and identity politics in the Balkans and Ukraine, and grammar systems. She is a frequent participant in Slavic linguistics events at OSU, including being a member of the Slavic Linguistics Forum.
Welcome, Chandini!
If you are an undergraduate student who is interested in a research opportunity, contact Andrea Sims to discuss possibilities. Students can earn course credit — Undergraduate Research (Slavic/Ling 4998(H)) or Linguistics Internship (Ling 3191). Some coursework in linguistics is necessary and some knowledge of a Slavic language is preferred, but no specific courses are required.
Undergraduate Slavic Linguistics Day
On October 7, the Slavic Linguistics Forum held a special session for undergraduate students interested in Slavic languages and linguistics. As the Slavic Department’s twitter feed observed, it was a full house, with 35 attendees!
We were excited to participate, with Andrea Sims leading an information session about research opportunities for undergraduates at Ohio State. (But not surprisingly, the show stopper was Daniel Collins’s talk on the linguistics of vampirism!)
Thanks to the Slavic Linguistics Forum leadership — Katya Rouzina, Hope Wilson, and Ryan Perkins — for organizing this great event.
If you are an undergraduate at OSU who is interested in linguistics and looking for a research opportunity, contact Andrea Sims to learn more.