During our annual Fund Drive, we like to feature undergraduate and MA students who have gone above and beyond the classroom to participate in the wider field of linguistics. Selected nominees exemplify a commitment to not only academic performance, but also to the field of linguistics and principles of scientific inquiry. Since this year’s Fund Drive theme is Future tense, we are especially thankful to be able to highlight undergraduate and MA students who are emerging as the future leaders in our field.

Today’s Rising Star is Mariana Ortiz Ponce, an undergraduate student at Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo. Mariana was nominated by her mentor, Dr. Andrés López Avila.

Mariana Ortiz is a brilliant senior student. She has specialized in the study of the linguistic characteristics of feminist discourse; in particular, she works on feminist slogans and mottos from a multidisciplinary perspective. In addition to carrying out a formal linguistic study, her work is a way of documenting linguistic-artistic expressions of dissidence, especially on the discourse of women. This makes her work doubly important: she explains the linguistic traits but also leaves a lasting transcription of texts full of art that are often in danger, because the medium is the skin, the screams, the banners, the paint on the walls. I think that Mariana is a linguist, an art curator and a social cause worker. She is amazing.

She also studies the link between language and identity and has proposed in an original way the theory that sorority and slogans are the cause and consequence of one another in a cycle that feeds and grows on itself. This proposal seems very valuable to me.

Mariana is a very sensitive and eloquent researcher. She has presented at international conferences and has received personal invitations to exhibit her work at universities in Mexico. Her scope of work is not just academic. She has taken her research to forums that raise awareness about the importance of the gender perspective in language studies. She is a feminist who helps train other feminists and helps empowerment. She is a linguist who documents the very complex texts of feminist slogans and mottos, preserving them for other generations, revaluing and protecting them. I believe that his work will also be important in the future as a historical document of the social movements in Mexico. Mariana Ortiz is undoubtedly a star who participates in the social, academic and artistic spheres.

Mariana writes:

I think that linguistics has a lot of opportunities for future study due to the constant changes that languages face. I have recently been learning about forensic linguistics and I consider it a way to combine linguistics and law in a way in which both disciplines nourish each other.
For example, in the resolution of legal cases, on many occasions lawyers can rely on linguists who are experts in the forensic field to study the messages and letters from the suspects. They provide support on the syntax, spelling and style of the people involved in the case and they can study details that other people who do not specialize in that field would not notice or could disregard.

In addition to having its field of study in society, linguistics has to be updated and adapted to innovations, technologies, among other social changes.
Personally, I am interested in gender issues and I think that linguistics can be studied from gender perspectives in a very broad way. I focus my study on feminist issues but there is a whole process of social deconstruction in which linguistics is involved through terminology, definitions, new semantic approaches to words and different interpretations from pragmatics. The process of deconstruction, explained in my own words, is a constant self-diagnosis of our ideology, judgments about society, stereotypes, customs and even gender roles. In general, to deconstruct is to question and rethink what we believe and how we act. As I mentioned before, societies are constantly changing and language is part of those changes from a cognitive perspective.

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The LINGUIST List looks forward to continuing to serve the linguistics community, including its up-and-coming stars, for years to come. You can contribute to our Fund Drive here: https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate