As the Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS) in the Georgetown University Department of Linguistics, I help guide undergraduates through our Linguistics program and regularly draw their attention to jobs and other opportunities for LING majors. It occurs to me that some of this information might be interesting to people besides the declared majors on my email list - for example, potential linguistics majors at Georgetown and elsewhere, prospective students, and their family members. Follow my occasional posts here!
NSF Doctoral Dissertation Award: Yoojin Kang
Congratulations to my doctoral student Yoojin Kang, who has officially been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to support her dissertation research! Yoojin will study the production and perception of dialect features by two groups in South Korea: natives of Kyungsang province who have been living in Seoul, and natives of Seoul who have been living in Kyungsang.
Seoul is urban and its dialect is considered prestigious and "standard", while Kyungsang is more rural and its dialect is relatively stigmatized. So probably everybody from Kyungsang who moves to Seoul just abandons their home dialect for the standard while Seoul migrants to Kyungsang maintain their native variety, right? In fact, Yoojin's previous work has suggested more complex patterns of behavior depending on the specific dialect feature involved, the attitude of the speaker, and how these and other factors interact with more global notions of (non)standardness. Her dissertation will expand and broaden this work, significantly contributing to knowledge about how people vary and change their dialects as a result of mobility and new dialect input.
Shannon Mooney Dissertation Defense
From left to right: Me, Shannon, and commitee members Natalie Schilling and Elissa Newport
Big congratulations to Shannon Mooney, who has successfully defended her dissertation, Child Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Variation! Shannon’s work examines stylistic variation and phonetic and phonological change among kindergarteners in a diverse school setting.
NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Award: Shannon Mooney
Congratulations to my (first doctoral!) student Shannon Mooney, who has been awarded an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant to support her work on Child Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Variation - see details and a project abstract here.