I am a lifelong student of language.
At present, I am learning Irish for the purpose of language revitalization, ancestral reclamation, and future translation projects. I hope to learn from the way Irish is protected and promoted, to be part of these efforts, and to apply what I learn to helping other communities. The languages in which I have the highest level of fluency (English, Chinese, Russian) are all languages of empires. It is my dream to use this fluency to create teaching materials for languages whose speaker-base has been weakened by these empires.
During summers, I am pursuing my second masters degree at the Davis School of Russian at Middlebury College in Vermont. My work there has focussed on developing a system to discern a more specific part of speech category for the “particles” found in the Russian language. The purpose of this work is to improve second language instruction, to assist in corpus tagging for the Russian National Corpus, and to improve theoretical understanding of the function of particles.
Before enrolling at Middlebury, I received my first masters from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Chinese language and pedagogy. In my thesis, I proposed a new method of categorizing Mandarin coverbs, which exist in the space between verb and preposition. Using a three-pronged approach (semantic, syntactic, and morphologic), I assessed the behavior of seventeen common coverbs and mapped the results onto a spectral diagram in order to visualize the space between word classes. It is this approach that I applied to my work in Russian particles at Middlebury.
After my undergraduate study, I was the Lab Manager at the Cognitive Science of Language Lab at the University of Maryland. There, I worked under Wing-Yee Chow running EEG experiments studying sentence processing. Our work explored the “bag of words” method of prediction and how this process is interrupted when a semantically surprising word is inserted at the end of an input string.
As an undergrad at UMass, I wrote my thesis on object marking in Uzbek and was part of a group of graduate students conducting fieldwork on Tshangla, an under-documented language of Eastern Bhutan.
Glynis Jones 