Linguistics faculty have been awarded funding for several new grants in 2023.
The Academy of Korean Studies (AKS) has awarded funding to John Whitman via a subaward from Binghamton University for his project Reinforcing the Status of Korean as a World Language: Theoretical and Applied Korean Linguistics. This project will involve a monograph, an article, and a workshop at Cornell. He will also collaborate with Sungdae Cho (Binghamton University) on organization of the Japanese/Korean (JK) Linguistics Conference.
The Central New York Humanities Corridor has awarded the LIN4 Syntax and Semantics Interfaces Working Group funding to support the Spring 2024 Tu+ Workshop. This workshop focuses on all aspects of linguistic research on Turkic languages, languages in contact with Turkic, and those spoken in geographic regions where Turkic languages are. Tu+ has been a venue for productive discussions and collaborations on Turkic and languages in contact with Turkic for almost 10 years. The Working Group includes John Whitman and Miloje Despic from Cornell; Jaklin Kornfilt from Syracuse University; and Jeffrey Runner and Asia Pietraszko from the University of Rochester.
The Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability Academic Venture Fund has awarded funding to John Whitman, Josephine Martell (Graduate School), and Troy Richardson (AIISP) for their project Promoting Biological and Linguistic Diversity Through Indigenous Language and Land-Based Practices to support the development of a summer language camp in Ithaca for members of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' diaspora.
The Cornell Center for Social Sciences (CCSS) has awarded funding to Helena Aparicio for her project Adaptation, Social Coordination & Pragmatic Inference. Linguistic interactions display spontaneous self-organizing behavior, pragmatic inference being the epitome of such coordinative behavior. However not much is known about cognitive mechanisms supporting coordination. The current project argues that adaptation is one of the mechanisms deployed by listeners to resolve pragmatic coordination problems.
The Mellon Foundation Just Futures Initiative, part of the Cornell Migrations Initiative, has awarded funding to John Whitman and Troy Richardson (AIISP) to support ongoing research
and outreach on the documentation, maintenance, and revitalization of the Indigenous
languages of our region, Gayogohó꞉nǫʔ (Cayuga) and Deyodiho:nǫʔ (Tutelo).
The President's Council of Cornell Women (PCCW) has awarded an Affinito-Stewart Grant to Helena Aparicio for her project Gender bias in Language Processing. Most research on implicit gender bias in language processing has focused on the processing of the speech signal, but much less is known about how gender information affects the interpretation of particular lexical items. The current proposal aims to bridge this gap through the case study of vague predicates, which can give rise to highly variable interpretations both across contexts and across speakers. In particular, we investigate whether implicit gender biases modulate the rate at which participants accept (less) prototypical uses of vague predicates. Such findings would indicate that the interpretation of certain lexical items can also be modulated by the speaker's perceived gender.
