35.1007, Featured Linguist: Laurel Stvan

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-1007. Fri Mar 22 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.1007, Featured Linguist: Laurel Stvan

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Date: 22-Mar-2024
From: Justin Fuller [justin at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Laurel Stvan


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.
Laurel Stvan, Associate Professor of Linguistics at The University of
Texas at Arlington.

Laurel writes:

Like a lot of linguists, my path to a PhD program in Linguistics was
not direct. My BA and MA were earned in an English department writing
program where I analyzed and wrote poetry. In retrospect, this shift
toward linguistics made a lot of sense. In creative writing classes we
focused our attention on the effects of the placement of individual
words, examining the power of a syllable set at a line break and its
ability to shift the reader’s focus. Later I discovered there were
whole disciplines that scientifically approached these same decisions,
offering theories to account for the polarity of connotation, the
effects of strong collocations, the measuring of syllable weight, and
the consequences of stress on interpretation.

I remember the concept of the Linguist List being floated at the LSA
meeting in 1991 when I was starting graduate school. It presented an
exciting use of the burgeoning medium of email. Now accessed via web
page and Twitter stream as well as through one’s inbox, this resource
has become the backbone of the profession. I use it for sending out
key communications (funded positions for students, conference
announcements, job ads, requests for project participants) and I
absolutely rely on it to receive crucial notices, too (calls for
conference papers and book chapters, book reviews to read and pursue,
and notices of dissertations.) It’s part of the professionalization
that I encourage now with my own students—to share their dissertation
abstracts, advertise their conference calls, and seek input in their
surveys and experiments.

Browsing the Linguist List across time, you can see the evolving range
of methods, frameworks, and data sources in use by linguists across
the globe. These changes show how linguistics relies on language data
to provide a clear reflection of the human language ability. While a
great deal of theorizing continues to be shaped by descriptions formed
by knowledgeable intuition, speaker judgements, and surveys,
increasingly, there is the desire and the increased ability to capture
a deeper cross section of real interactions and spontaneous
production. This “data as mirror” analogy underscores many empirical
approaches employed in linguistics today, in which collecting data
from experimental, corpus-based, or multi-modal projects allow
scholars to form more nuanced models of the variations in language
that our brains process. A very shiny mirror can send out an intense
beam of light, however. So perhaps we’re moving into a time of putting
effort into channeling rather than being blinded by the light’s flow.
This means complementing efforts to gather any and all unstructured
data with our skills in creating annotations and recording contexts to
better recognize patterns.

Though I benefit from living in a time of big data, my own research
has been aimed at examining and theorizing about the small, often
overlooked pieces that contribute to understanding meaning in language
and to finding and investigating those pieces in targeted domains that
can better capture the styles they represent. These include a number
of works offering pragmatic interpretations of the presence or absence
of determiners. Starting with my dissertation, I traced a focused lack
of English articles in places where prescriptively they ought to be,
and what the pattern of their absence meant. This was based on
naturally occurring data, but gathered just before searches through
web pages were an option, and when conversation transcripts and
datasets were small and locally housed. I later looked again at the
presence of determiners, this time diachronically, specifically noting
their absence in sentence-initial shell noun constructions. Again, a
pattern of increasing absence could only be seen with enough attested
data to examine. So, corpus data, this time distilled from the online
Corpus of Historical American English offered a way to exploit the
gaps in this pattern’s distribution. Another of my projects presented
a morphological analysis of a suffix found in many brand names. I
mined the dataset for that work from searches in the United States
Patent and Trademark Office’s database of live and pending trademark
registrations, under the assumption that it would provide a
concentration of both the -ex suffixes I was after (e.g., Kleenex,
Timex, Windex), and discussions of what the products that contained
this form were intended to be used for, as well as how transparently
the inclusion of an -ex morpheme signaled this. Another of my projects
used Google image searches of social media data to examine ways that
memes can be used to perform speech acts of advice among peers. The
presence of ever-growing amounts of digital data makes possible
intriguing new ways to capture and share instances of language use in
context, reflecting new facets of language interactions. Increasingly,
however, this access comes with the caveat that the language users may
also have less awareness of where their digital exchanges could end
up. So perhaps some contemporary data now serves as more of a two-way
mirror.

At any rate, I love being in a field where I have colleagues from
across disciplines working to explore how language is used and
processed. I look forward to learning how they will each polish and
aim the mirror of language data to enrich our understanding of
linguistic meaning. Join me in following along on Linguist List to see
when and where these discoveries are being shared.

----

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LINGUIST List: Vol-35-1007
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