27.1435, Featured Linguist: Ida Toivonen

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-1435. Fri Mar 25 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.1435, Featured Linguist: Ida Toivonen

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Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2016 10:17:14
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Ida Toivonen

 
Dear LINGUIST List Readers,

We are pleased to present you our first featured linguist, Ida Toivonen, for
Fund Drive 2016.

Please support the LINGUIST List editors and activities with a donation:

http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/

---------------------------------------------- 

In primary school and high school, my favourite subjects were languages and
math. I later came to realize that this is true for many linguists.  I did
better in math classes than other classes, but I really loved the languages. 
I grew up in a Swedish-speaking area of Finland, and I studied Finnish in
school. I also studied English, French, German and Spanish. I loved the
classes, but I seemed to like the languages for different reasons than my
peers. My friends either did not like studying languages, or else they liked
it because it might be useful. You could communicate with people from
different places and backgrounds. I never became good at communicating in the
languages I studied, I simply enjoyed the patterns and structures. The grammar
lectures and exercises were great, but I didn’t really enjoy the conversation
exercises.

After high school, I had some idea that languages and math don’t “go together”
and I would have to choose.  I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to attend
Brandeis University in Waltham outside Boston, and I chose to study French
language and literature. I enjoyed those classes very much, but what became my
true passion was linguistics.  In my first semester, I took Introduction to
Linguistics.  I didn’t quite get all the talk about cognition, but the puzzles
in the homework assignments were a lot of fun. I was hooked and decided to
double-major in French and Linguistics. Boston was obviously a great place to
be for exploring linguistics, and I attended talks and classes around town.  I
received valuable support from Joan Maling and Ray Jackendoff at Brandeis, and
also Charles Reiss and Mark Hale at Harvard. I got to spend a lot of time with
many people who care deeply about how language works.  All the talk of
language and cognition slowly started to make sense.  I was intrigued by all
aspects of linguistics that I learned about, but I ended up writing my thesis
on a topic in Finnish morphosyntax.

(...)

Read more: 

http://blog.linguistlist.org/uncategorized/featured-linguist-ida-toivonen/






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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-1435	
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