Susanne Vejdemo

Editor

susanne [at] linguistlist [dot] org

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I have a swedish master degree from Stockholm university, and will turn this into an international master at Eastern Michigan. I want to complement my current skills with more computer programming and a deeper knowledge of statistics. East Michigan and the Linguist List environment seems ideal for this. By all accounts it is one of the more stimulating and exciting places to be if one is interested in descriptive linguistics, language documentation and the forefront of applied computational linguistcs. I hope that "the Linguist List experience" will get me into contact with researchers from a variety of different linguistic fields.

My B.A Thesis centered around the conscious and unconscious language acquisition methods used by L3 learners of two (quite different) constructed languages. The main focus was on the morphosyntactic development and I attempted to locate patterns in which grammemes in the output were affected by L1, L2 or the grammars that the learners had studied. In order to do this I acquired two hours of recorded (elicited speech), transcribed it and put the resulting data into a database. Once I'd mastered the languages myself (having rather simple grammar and quite limited vocabularies this was not a problem) I translated and tagged it. The learners relied heavily on both L1 and L2 for grammatical loans and were quite inventive and good at reinventing the grammar of the constructed language on the fly.

Though I found the research very interesting I decided to pursue another path in my M.A Thesis. I decided to use my new, limited but still quite effective, knowledge of how one might (and, perhaps more useful, how one definitely should not) construct corpora. This time I attempted to look for semantic patterns (differences and similarities) in the uses of the English adjective "sharp" and two, tightly intertwined Swedish translations of this word. Though the Swedish adjectives are seen by many as very strong synonyms that are difficult to differentiate, different patterns appear in their usage when enough corpus instances are examined.

I have been the head organizer for the Swedish Linguistics Olympiad for two years and gone with the swedish team as team leader to the International Linguistcs Olympiad in St.Petersburg.

Good conversational topics to bring up at parties: artifical languages (oh, the beauty!), prescriptive grammars (oh, the horror!), linguistic olympiads (oh yeah!)...