Institute of Linguistics Summer 2023 Fellows Presentation

Sam Kennedy: Doing Linguistics in the Summertime: A Honeymoon with Grammar

The Linguistics Society of America Summer Institute is a 95-year-old place of learning bringing together hundreds of faculty and students for four weeks of intensive linguistics study. The 2023 Summer Institute was held at the University of Massachusetts and featured nearly 100 courses in every area of linguistics, from beginning-level to advanced. In this talk, I recount my own experiences at the Summer Institute, and reflect on studying linguistics away from one's home institution. 

Sam is a first-year PhD student at the University of Minnesota. He is interested in the syntax and semantics of Mandarin and Taiwanese. 

Emily Tope: A (preliminary) sociolinguistic analysis of television’s Moira Rose

Moira Rose, a prominent character of the Canadian sitcom Schitt’s Creek, is known for her over-the-top, well, everything: melodramatic tantrums, avant-garde fashion, and what the series itself calls “an unrecognizable accent.” Moira’s speech calls attention to itself through heavy use of obscure and antiquated vocabulary, British vowels and European-influenced pronunciations, and exaggerated prosody and stress patterns. Using third-wave sociolinguistics as a framework (Eckert, 2012)—in which individuals create social meaning through a variety of linguistic features they choose to employ—and research at the television-linguistics interface, this presentation will discuss preliminary findings that suggest Moira’s linguistic behaviors mark her as a (wannabe) member of the cultural elite.  

Emily is a master's student in UMN's Institute of Linguistics, and she is presently interested in historical linguistics (esp. Romance and Germanic) and sociolinguistics. Outside of academia, she watches what some would call an exorbitant amount of television. 

Emily Posson: A Dialectal Comparison Between East and West Finnmark North Saami Phonology

Some of the Saami languages spoken in northern Scandinavia possess ternary gemination, an extremely rare phenomenon among the world’s languages. Northern Saami has several dialectal groups, and this study examines two - Eastern Finnmark (Kárášjohka) and Western Finnmark (Guovdageaidnu). Of these, only Guovdagaeidnu possess ternary gemination. Kárášjohka uses a different process to maintain contrast. It is hoped that a comparison between the two will be able to explain some of the underlying processes that lead to ternary gemination. The examination of the data from a recent visit to Tromsø, Norway is ongoing.  

Emily is in the second year of the Linguistics MA program of the University of Minnesota. Her academic interests lie primarily in fieldwork, endangered languages, phonology, and color terms.

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