The LINGUIST List

The LINGUIST List has offered summer internships to linguistics students since 2007, when our now-Associate Project Manager Matt Lahrman was the first-ever LINGUIST intern (how far and how quickly he rose!).  Ever since, LINGUIST List has chosen a few  promising students from around the world to join us for a summer, learn about linguistic technologies, and gain firsthand experience working on LL projects.  Internships are one of the programs we fund with the money raised during Fund Drive – so thank you, LINGUIST List donors, for helping us bring these interns on board!

We’re delighted to tell you that this year we’ll be hosting an unprecedented nine summer interns due to additional funding from the National Science Foundation.  Our first intern joined us on Monday, and the 2012 internship cohort will continue arriving until June; stay tuned for an upcoming post introducing this year’s LINGUIST interns!

What have past LINGUIST List interns said about their experiences?  Here’s a sampler:

“I really like the people here. We’re all interesting, smart people and we genuinely like to be here together. Also, we get to work on great projects.” -Danielle St. Jean, 2009 summer intern and subsequent LINGUIST editor

“The intern program at LINGUIST allows you to explore and develop your interests, and find ones you never knew you had.” -Danniella Hornby, 2010 summer intern and current LL Publications Editor

“I greatly valued the camaraderie between workers in the office and having the chance to bounce ideas off of each other in each of the projects. I also enjoyed the problem solving aspect of my work, specifically the foresight and creativity necessary to digitize complex maps.” -Christine Evans, 2011 summer intern and current Fulbright scholar

If you missed your chance to intern this summer, never fear: you’ll get a chance next year. The call for 2013 interns will go out this fall; see the 2012 call for interns here.

We’re delighted to announce that our latest Linguist of the Day is Martin Haspelmath!  Dr. Haspelmath is best known for his work in comparative syntax, morphology, language contact, and linguistic universals.  His tale begins:

I find biographies of people, and especially of linguists, a fascinating subject, and I think it’s a wonderful idea to ask linguists how they got into the field. But my own story does not really contain any surprising elements, at least at the beginning: I got fascinated by languages early on, beginning with a Spanish course on the West German radio (“Vamos a España,” a very easy course in 20 lessons of 15 minutes each, geared to tourists) that I listened to when I was 14 years old…

Does Dr. Haspelmath’s story contain surprising elements after the beginning?  You bet!  Read on at the Hall of Heroes…

At January’s LSA meeting, we invited visitors to our office hours to record vlogs (an adorable portmanteau of video + blog, for those new to the term) describing what they like about LINGUIST List.  Several folks were kind enough to sit down and record some video testimonials.  A few choice quotes:

“I just want to give a shout out to LINGUIST List for all they’ve done to help facilitate linguistic communication within the field.”  -Gary Holton, Alaska Native Language Center

“It’s really useful as a discipline to have a clearinghouse of all this information.  A lot of other disciplines don’t have that… I’m really glad LINGUIST List exists.”  -Stephanie Morse, University of California, Santa Barbara

“Do you want to find out what people are talking about in linguistics?  You can go to LINGUIST List. It’s a great resource.  It’s made a huge difference for me.”  -Marianna Di Paolo, Center for American Indian Languages

“I look at LINGUIST List every single day.  It’s my link to the world of linguistics.” -Julia James, Independent Researcher 

We’d love to hear from other users! Send us your videos with accolades, suggestions, or general comments about LINGUIST, and we’ll feature them on the blog and Facebook!

Here at LL Headquarters, there are a lot of wugs to be seen.  Homemade wug clocks.  Wug magnets.  Wug mugs (say it ten times fast).  Even a couple of wug tattoos.  The adorable little mascot of language acquisition studies is a beloved staple around here.

That is partly why we are so delighted to feature as our Linguist of the Day Dr. Jean Berko Gleason, who in addition to the Wug Test has done a great deal of amazing work in the field of psycholinguistics.  She shares with LINGUIST readers the story of how she came to be a linguist, excerpted here:

“The languages, and the literature we read, The Wild Duck in Norwegian, for instance, and parts of the Mahabharata in Sanskrit were absorbing, but they were not really what I was looking for. Quite by happenstance, I enrolled during my senior year in a new course called the Psychology of Speech and Communication, taught by a young assistant professor named Roger Brown, who had recently arrived from the University of Michigan.  The lectures were a revelation, beautifully organized, and full of startling ideas…”

Read more at the Hall of Heroes!

We are pleased to announce that Mamoru Saito is our newest Linguist of the Day!  Dr. Saito is renowned for his work with syntactic theory, comparative syntax, and the structure of Japanese; however, he wasn’t always a prominent syntactician.  Visit the Hall of Heroes to read his tale of how he found his way to linguistics; his story begins:

My path to linguistics was probably a bit unusual. I was already 24 when I started studying linguistics in 1978. I was fortunate to receive three key pieces of advice that led me into the field.

I was stubborn, independent and in retrospect, stupid when I was a teenager in Japan. I pretty much ignored schoolwork and spent much of my time reading novels and philosophy books. That continued until I suddenly felt that there were more things I ought to know and that I wanted to be “taught.”

What were the three pieces of advice?  Read more and find out!