35.1180, Rising Star: Aaron Lener

Tue Apr 9 22:05:02 UTC 2024

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-1180. Tue Apr 09 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.1180, Rising Star: Aaron Lener

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Date: 10-Apr-2024
From: Justin Fuller [justin at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Rising Star: Aaron Lener

During our annual Fund Drive, we like to feature undergraduate and
early-career graduate 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 Mirrors and Reflections, we are
especially excited to recognize those Rising Stars whose bright light
is sure to reflect onto the field for years to come. Today's Rising
Star meets this criterion!

It is my pleasure to announce that today's Rising Star is Aaron Lener,
an undergraduate student at Syracuse University. Aaron was nominated
by his mentor, Dr. Christopher Green, who wrote to us and said:

"Aaron is the epitome of a Rising Star. Before classes were even
underway in his freshman year, we had already met and had a plan of
attack for the year ahead -- negation in Jarawan, a severely
underdescribed language group in Nigeria that has been the focus of my
research for approximately 5 years. Within one week of gaining access
to my 17k word corpus, Aaron had already cataloged all instances of
negation in it and started to form hypotheses for testing. He has
since taken to drawing up his own questionnaires to be sent to our
speakers, and quickly learned to use Praat and FLEx to process,
catalog, and analyze his findings. He was awarded internal funding to
continue the project this Spring and Summer and has not one, but three
talks on the horizon this year where he will discuss links between
negation patterns, constituent focus, and tense/aspect in two Jarawan
languages. All of this, within just a few months, clearly illustrates
the bright future Aaron has ahead of him. His commitment, critical
thinking, and drive are well beyond his years."

Aaron reflects:

"Language involves an endless series of interactions between the
speaker and the broader world. That is to say, language initiates the
process by which we shape our surroundings, and, in turn, the process
by which our surroundings shape us. This bilateral give and take can
resemble a reflection of sorts; not an exact mirror image, but rather
an imperfect refraction of the speaker’s sentiments into reality, and
vice versa. The role of language as a translator between the intended
and the actualized is just one of its many fascinating qualities, and
one that inspired me to dive deeper into linguistics.

"Linguistics is a burgeoning area of study with many prospects for the
curious. My work in particular lies in morphophonemics, morphosyntax,
and the relevance of morphology and syntax to typological research. As
my mentor, Dr. Chris Green of Syracuse University has put it, I am an
'interface guy.'

"I have recently been familiarizing myself with the morphosyntactic
properties of negation and theoretical work exploring negative phrasal
structures as a part of a documentation project for the Jarawan
languages, specifically Mbat and Galamkya. This group of languages,
spoken in Northeastern Nigeria, has been largely neglected in the
literature and lacks comprehensive description. Descriptive efforts
thus far, primarily led by my mentor at Syracuse University, have
focused on phonology and morphology, with little discussing syntactic
structures. As such, typological work on the languages has been
limited, as critical syntactic information has been missing.

"My work, which provides a preliminary investigation into the
morphosyntactic properties of negation in Mbat and Galamkya, aims to
advance not only the ongoing documentation project, but also
typological research seeking to classify the languages. Additionally,
there are numerous linguists who have recently studied the typology of
negation in Northern Sub-Saharan Africa to whom a detailed survey of
negation in Mbat and Galamkya would be of great interest and value.

"My current project on negation has been six months in the making, and
I am very excited to share it with the larger academic community. I
will be delivering a poster presentation at the 2024 Atlantic Coast
Conference Meeting of the Minds at the University of Notre Dame, as
well as a number of other presentations, both oral and poster, at
Syracuse University.

"In terms of the future, I am looking to make a career in linguistics,
hopefully earning a PhD and making my home amongst like-minded
scholars. I have found the community of linguists working in academia
to be incredibly welcoming and supportive, and I have every intention
to follow this path wherever it may take me. Similar to how language
acts as a refractor, imperfectly translating our thoughts out to the
wider world, I hope my experience in linguistics is an imperfectly
refracted image of what I have experienced so far: a sustained sense
of belonging despite ever-changing research interests and
opportunities for academic enrichment."

________________________________

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including its up-and-coming Rising Stars, for years to come. But we
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