Every year as part of our fund drive, the LINGUIST List features a number of linguists whose research is of particular interest to our readers, whose lives as linguists or path to linguistics has been remarkable, and/or who have impacted and contributed to the worldwide linguistics community.

I'm pleased to announce that this week's Featured Linguist is Dr. Patrícia Amaral, Director of Graduate Studies with the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Patrícia writes:

I was invited to reflect on how Linguist List has affected my path as a linguist. My research focuses on understanding meaning but I have worked on a wide variety of topics. Broadly speaking, my work can be situated at the intersection of semantic/pragmatics/morphosyntax. In the following I describe how I got here, and how Linguist List helped me along the way.

I discovered linguistics through literature, in two ways. My undergraduate degree at the University of Coimbra (Portugal) was in Classics, and my original goal was to study ancient Greek tragedy. However, I soon realized that I was much more interested in the grammar of ancient Greek than in the literary works (though I still like theater). When I had to do class projects, I chose works like Plato’s Cratylos or Varro’s De lingua latina. The second discovery was John Austin’s book How to do things with words? that I read in my first-year Intro to Literary Studies. I remember thinking to myself “I want to write something like this”. While I definitely haven’t written, or will ever write, anything like that, Austin’s book sparked my interest in semantics and pragmatics.
Through Linguist List I discovered the LSA 2001 Summer Institute at UC Santa Barbara. The institute had a long-lasting impact on me. It was fun! I spent nights helping my roommate gloss examples from Tibeto-Burman languages that I knew nothing about and chatting with other students about what grad school looked like. In that institute I attended a course on semantic change taught by Elizabeth Traugott. This was the beginning of my interest in studying meaning change as a lens to investigating different types of meaning.

I ended up going to graduate school at The Ohio State University, which was a serendipitous but fortunate choice. I was lucky to work with fellow students in Spanish and Portuguese as well as Linguistics who later became co-authors and wonderful friends. At OSU I was influenced by linguists of very different persuasions: Scott Schwenter, Craige Roberts, David Dowty, Brian Joseph, Bob Levine, Shari Speer. Such varied training has taught me to keep a certain degree of skepticism for every theory and to value different types of empirical evidence.

At OSU I became interested in experimental approaches to meaning, which were not very common then, but provided the right tools for the questions I wanted to ask. Along the way, several conferences found on Linguist List led me to other people doing experimental work at the time, both in the US and Europe, and I learned a great deal from them. I became increasingly interested in the growing field of experimental pragmatics and in what carefully designed experiments can reveal about presupposition and different types of implicatures. I was intrigued by the meaning components of almost and barely and these tools offered new ways to probe into their meanings. At the same time, I became aware of computational approaches to historical linguistics that brought new perspectives of studying meaning change. My current work adopts distributional approaches to semantic change (using word embeddings) and asks what these approaches bring to our understanding of meaning more generally. I think that we need to better grasp the implications of these methods and what they afford us from a theoretical perspective. This type of work has made me aware of the lack of resources for languages other than English, which should concern us all as linguists. Reflecting on my path, I remain as interested in meaning as before, but am now more aware and committed to addressing disparities in resources for linguistic work.

When I started my job here at Indiana University, I was thrilled to find out that this was the new home of Linguist List. I read the Digest every day and tell my students to do so as well. As my former colleague Clancy Clements likes to say, “one thing leads to another”, and Linguist List leads to many good things.

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Thank you for reading her story! You can donate to this year’s Fund Drive here: https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate