Summer 2008 project descriptions
Project 1
Faculty mentor: Paul Kiparsky
Project title: Poetries in contact: the encounter of Perso-Arabic and Sanskritic metrical traditions
Project description: For a project partly funded by the Humanities Center, I need help with transcription and metrical analysis of poems in the following languages: Urdu, Persian, Turkish. See the original project description.
Kind of work intern will provide: The intern would work with Tyler Schnoebelen and with me during the summer to build a corpus of metrically analyzed verse.
Qualifications or required skills: The intern should know Urdu, Persian, or Turkish and have at least a rudimentary understanding of phonology (know the difference between speech and writing, what a syllable is, etc.). Ability to read the Persian script is a desideratum for Turkish and a necessity for the other languages.
Project 2
Faculty mentor: Meghan Sumner
Project title: The learning, generalization, and use of non-native contrastive cues
Project Description: This project examines how it is we adapt and adjust to all of the variation found in the speech signal. The focus is on adaptation to non-native speech. The broad focus of the project is how native English listeners attend to information that signals a contrast between two words that is non-native, or new. For example, the difference in pronunciation between the words 'bet' and 'bed' is mainly one of duration (both vowel and consonant duration). In non-native speech, sometimes this distinction is lost and a new cue is used to disambiguate two minimal pairs (e.g., in the case of native Korean speakers of English, the cue used in glottal pulsing into closure). By examining the perception of different words, contexts, and speakers using these new cues, we can address important questions regarding the learning, generalization, and storage of contrastive information.
Kind of work intern will provide: Interns working on this project will be involved in all aspects of the project. Typical tasks include audio recording, stimuli preparation and manipulation, scripting in Praat, running subjects, data analysis, and experimental design and preparation using E-Prime.
Qualifications: Interest in acoustics and speech perception, along with a willingness to learn new technical skills.
Project 3:
Faculty mentor: Arnold M. Zwicky
Project title: The OI Project: Too many words, too few (part 2)
Project description: Most usage handbooks caution writers not to use too many words, and not to use too few. In Fine & Josephson's More Nitty-Gritty Grammar (2001:182), we're told "Don't add extra words" (e.g. the "of" in "too long of a skit") and also "Don't leave out a word" (e.g. the "of" not found in "a couple ideas"). As part of a larger project on "umbrella rules" like these and the role they play in the prescriptivist program, I have been assembling an inventory of the specific cases that illustrate Omit Needless Words (the O of OI) and Include All Necessary Words (the I of OI) in a large sampling of handbooks. My hypothesis is that the great bulk of these cases do not involve adjustments for informativeness and clarity (a la Grice), as you might think from the way the umbrella rules are worded, but are in fact usages proscribed because of their social status: they are non-standard, regional, informal, conversational, or innovative.
Kind of work intern will provide: Last summer's intern created an inventory handbook by handbook; this inventory now needs to be cross-indexed to an inventory usage by usage, with the usages classified by a coding system to be developed by this summer's intern and me.
I am especially interested in cases of preposition/zero alternation, as in "It all depends (on) who's in the kitchen" (where omission of on is widely treated as a violation of Include All Necessary Words). A subproject will focus specifically on these, since a number of cases escaped the net of last summer's project.
Qualifications: The intern should have basic level linguistics. Some background in syntax and/or semantics would be a plus, but is not required.
Project 4:
Faculty mentor: Joan Bresnan
Project title: Predicting the Genitive Alternation
Project description: Concepts of possession can be conveyed by alternative expressions in English --
1a) the shadow of the woman b) the woman's shadow
Although the "'s genitive" (ia) and "of genitive" (1b) in general may convey different meanings, they are often very close paraphrases. Predicting which construction will be used depends on multiple, often conflicting syntactic, semantic, and informational properties. The present project aims to create a database of genitive constructions to be extracted from telephone conversations in American English, in order to develop a predictive empirical model of how speakers choose which construction to use.
Kind of work intern will provide: A research assistant is needed to work on this project with Professor Bresnan. The work will primarily involve creation and annotation of the database of genitive constructions, as well as literature review and (possibly) assistance with running an experiment.
Qualifications: Valuable qualifications would include some knowledge of lexical semantics and syntax, a good feeling for English subtleties and nuances, and possibly scripting skills (perl or python). Familiarity with corpus linguistics would also be a big plus.