30.1249, Featured Linguist: Jason Rothman

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-1249. Mon Mar 18 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.1249, Featured Linguist: Jason Rothman

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Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2019 12:22:46
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Jason Rothman

 
Dear LINGUIST List Readers:

We're pleased to present Professor Jason Rothman this week as part of our
"Featured Linguists" series! Read his biogaphy below--you might find it sounds
a lot like your own journey to linguistics! Certainly it sounds familiar to
some of us at LL!

I have always loved language.  I wanted to be a linguist before I really knew
what linguistics was. Like many, I originally thought that being a linguist
meant a perpetual life of learning language after language.  So dedicated was
I to that romantic notion as a teenager that I forged parental consent at the
age of 17 to get a tattoo on my inner right ankle. Supposedly it said
“linguistics” in Mandarin characters. I have since found out that what is
actually there is, well, close enough!  It is a good thing that becoming a
linguist has worked out, since tattoos are permanent.  In many ways, I was
utterly naïve about what a linguist studies. Of course, there are many types
of linguists and many complimentary questions related to language worthy of
scientific investigation. But, in hindsight, I was not really aware then of
even the essential elements that transcend paradigms and, we would agree (I
hope) make us linguists.   I suppose the path that brought me in my youth to
dedicate myself to linguistics is not terribly different from many: A deep
fascination with language coupled with a nerdy desire to understand the
dynamic, essential characteristic of this mundane property that defines us as
humans, yet is mostly taken for granted.

    My real linguistic journey began in earnest in my late teens, when I moved
from a suburb of New York City to the remote lands of farm-country New York
state.  5 hours from my people-packed home environment, in what appeared to me
to be the middle of nowhere, stood a shining and ‘gorges’ beacon of
scholarship and architectural beauty (Ithaca is famous for its gorges and,
thus, the saying Ithaca is gorges instead of gorgeous).  My first proper
linguistics course was, Introduction to Linguistics taught by Professor Wayne
Harbert.  He was so passionate and such a good teacher, but it is,
nevertheless, fair to say that my romantic notion of what linguistics is was
shattered.  It was hard.  It was serious. It was a science! I began to think
that maybe this tattoo was going to need a cover-up.  I am not sure that laser
technology to remove tattoos existed in the mid 1990s, so I was even more
determined to keep at it.  After the initial shocks of phonetics and
phonology—the first part of the course as I recall—my introduction to syntax
assured me I was on the right path.  I stopped designing the cover-up tattoo
somewhere around Halloween of that first semester.  At Cornell, I was able to
study linguistics but also Romance languages in all their glory.  While I had
wonderful professors in cultural studies and literature as well, these courses
further hammered home that my love of language would best be served with a
linguistic perspective.

    In 1999, I moved to Los Angeles to start a MA/PHD at UCLA.  During the MA
portion, I studied most closely with the late Professor Claudia Parodi and
Prof. Carlos Quicoli. Although we were focused on Romance languages,
particularly Spanish and Portuguese, we were taught to use them as tools to
understand language in general.  Accurate description of these languages was
important, but not enough.  Somewhat differently from my undergraduate degree
training, sophisticated description was not the end goal. Professors Parodi
and Quicoli taught me what I know of formal syntactic theory and in doing so
they instilled in me the importance of approaching language in a truly
scientific manner.  Today I would describe myself as a formal psycholinguist
passionately interested in, if not obsessed with, how the mind represents and
processes language(s). But at this time, I had not yet discovered the full
joys of language acquisition and processing.  The formative years of my MA
studies, however, paved the way. I recall thinking: How could these complex
systems possibly come to be acquired?  If language was as complex as I was
studying, how does the child get (much of) this in her head even before she
fully develops domain-general cognition and is able to do other demanding
cognitive tasks like math? How do bilingual children do this for multiple
languages?  How do adults do this and why—at what levels—are they different in
acquiring these systems?

In 2001, I took my first bona-fide course on general acquisition theory with
Professor Nina Hyams. I could not have imagined then how a single course would
change the path of my career trajectory and thinking.  I found it.  I loved
syntactic theory.  I was seemingly good at it. However, it was not completely
satisfying for me devoid of experimentation probing the development of these
complex systems. At the time, experimental syntax as we know it in recent
years largely did not exist.  I had been working on null arguments in Spanish
and Portuguese at the time.  I recall learning in Nina’s class about the
well-known Delay in Principle B effect in child language—when children of
certain languages until late (age 5 or so) can violate Principle B of the
Binding Theory.  At the time, one proposal regarding why this is seen in some
languages and not others related to whether the language syntactically
licensed null arguments (subjects). It was fascinating.  I was hooked.  I
wrote my first paper related to how studying Brazilian Portuguese, a language
believed to be in a diachronic shift from a null subject to a non-null subject
language, children could help adjudicate between theoretical proposals. I
found a way to combine my love for language in general and my skills in and
penchant for the precision of formal linguistic theory to a domain where
theories can be tested directly.  I never looked back.

The next year, also in a course Nina teaches on bilingualism and second
language acquisition, I was first introduced to two other amazing role models
that would forever change my thinking.  By this time, I had already decided
that I would do my PhD work in acquisition but I was still unsure in what
populations.  Nina is not a specialist in bilingualism.  And so, although
skype did not exist at the time, she supplemented this course with lectures
via video-conferencing and/or live performances. One such lecture was by
Professor Bonnie Schwartz who talked to us about her then new model related to
child L2 acquisition.  Another was by Professor Maria (Masha) Polinsky on
heritage language bilingualism.  Both are now dear friends and colleagues.  I
am not sure they will even recall the questions I asked in those lectures,
having given that specific lecture or, if so, that I was even there, but their
talks left such an impression on me.  By the end of this term, I knew that I
would work on bilingualism.  That was not necessarily a wise idea or an easy
path because UCLA does not have an emphasis on this, at least from a formal
linguistic perspective, but I was determined.  And Nina was very
inspirational, motivating and supportive.  Between her and Carlos Quicoli and
very generous people in the field who helped along the way, I was able to put
together a decent dissertation project and learn so much.

I was very fortunate to get a job immediately after graduating—this was 2005
when such things were more possible.  My first one was at the University of
Iowa where, among many other great friends and colleagues, I was very
fortunate to fall under the wing of a proverbial giant who seemed to believe
in me more I did myself.  If you know me now, you might not believe it but I
was then a (more) quiet person who was not so confident in his abilities. 
Professor Roumyana Slabakova was the most supportive mentor any new assistant
professor could ask for.  She forced me, in ways she knows and for things she
did consciously and in ways she does not know because it was simply her
presence and her excellence, to believe in myself and that together we could
train a proverbial army to ask and answer important questions.  Together we
started the journal Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism (this year finishing
its 10th year in production), built the first lab I (co)-directed and mentored
many wonderful PhD students who are now leading changes in our field.  In
2010, I moved to the University of Florida where I was able to mentor another
cohort of truly exceptional students and grow in my research base.  It was
there that my bug for psycholinguistic methods first took hold, not the least
due to my wonderful colleagues working with online measures. It was also there
that my concern for incorporating input quality in formal linguistic theories
related to the development and ultimate attainment of bilingualism, especially
heritage language bilingualism, was solidified.  

In 2013, I took a full professorship in the School of Psychology and Clinical
Language Sciences at the University of Reading, in the UK.  At the time, the
Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM) was being formed and I was one
of the new hires for the center.  Reading has been very formative, not the
least due to being in a Psychology department.  I made a conscious effort to
learn about, expand into and invest in online processing methodologies and the
connections between language and cognition (especially in bilingualism) more
generally. I was able to found the University of Reading Psycho-and
Neurolinguistics lab, co-directing it with Dr. Ian Cunnings. Using behavioral
experimentation, eye-tracking, EEG/ERP and even (f)MRI we have been able to
inject formal linguistic insights into studying how the mind and brain adapt
to bilingualism as well as combine formal linguistic theory questions into
modern psycholinguistics where this has been rarely done for heritage language
bilingualism and adult additive multilingualism.

As I write this, I am in the process of moving full time to UiT The Arctic
University of Norway, where since 2014 I have been in a 20% Adjunct Professor
position in the Language Acquisition, Variation and Attrition (LAVA) research
group and the NTNU/UiT joint Acquisition, Variation and Attrition (AcqVA)
group.  At UiT, we will inaugurate the Pyscholinguistics of Language
Representation (PoLaR) lab which will bring EEG/ERP to language research above
the Arctic Circle. In September, I will begin a 4-year research project funded
by the Tromsø Forskiningsstiftelse (TFS) entitled Heritage Language
Proficiency in their Native Grammar (HeLPiNG).  This roughly 3-million-Euro
grant will employ several post-doctoral scholars as well as fractional
professorships through 2023. While I will miss my Reading family terribly, I
am very excited to join full-time what is one of the best epicenters of
linguistics anywhere in the world, not only the incredible cluster of
linguists in LAVA and AcqVA but across several other world-leading research
groups in various domains of linguistics housed at UiT, Center of Advanced
Studies in Theoretical Linguistics (CASTL) and Cognitive Linguistics:
Empirical Approaches Russian (CLEAR) .
As is likely true of most, many accidents, a lot of luck, passion and
endurance has brought me to where I am today.  I have been fortunate to work
with the most talented group of young scholars over the past 14 years. My
students and postdocs have inspired and challenged me more than anyone else
and remind me that while I am a professor, I am also a student at the same
time.  This year marks 20 years since I began graduate school and while there
have been many ups and downs, I feel privileged to have done so much more than
I ever thought possible when I first moved to Los Angeles from Ithaca.  So
many people have supported me along the way, whatever I have accomplished is a
testament to all that you have contributed.  You know who you are, so thank
you.  A quarter century has passed since I got that linguistics tattoo.  While
it’s a little faded on the surface its longevity and symbolism are
real,inspiring and enduring.

Thanks for reading, and if you want to donate to the LINGUIST List, you can go
to this link: https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

All the Best, 
--the LL Team







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