31.2846, Featured Linguist: Lauren Gawne!

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-2846. Mon Sep 21 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.2846, Featured Linguist: Lauren Gawne!

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Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2020 04:07:10
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Lauren Gawne!

 
Dear Linguist List Readers,

This week, we are pleased to present Professor Lauren Gawne as part of our
Featured Linguists series!

--

Early next year my blog Superlinguo will turn 10, which means I’ve been
blogging about linguistics for almost a third of LINGUIST List’s life. I’ve
been a subscriber to LINGUIST List a little longer than that, having signed up
at the start of graduate school in 2009, something I now encourage my own grad
students to do. One of the delightful things about blogging for almost as long
as I’ve been a full-time linguist is that the blog now acts as an external
memory device; I wrote a detailed post about how I got into linguistics back
in 2012. I came to linguistics by luck, but I have stayed because language is
endlessly interesting, and because linguists are an enthusiastic bunch. 

I’ve been passionate about sharing linguistics with wider audiences since my
graduate days because I want more people to have the opportunity to approach
language like linguists, without having to accidentally end up in an intro
course because their friend suggested it. When I started Lingthusiasm, a
podcast that is enthusiastic about linguistics, with Gretchen McCulloch in
2016, we wanted to capture the joyful nerdiness you find in conference
corridor chats whenever a group of linguists assemble, in a format that's fun
and engaging no matter how much you already know about linguistics. Gretchen
and I also want to see more linguistics communication in the world, which is
why we launched the LingComm grants in 2020, and share curated linguistics
communication projects that are useful for teaching with through the Mutual
Intelligibility newsletter. 

My research interests all stem from an expansive approach to linguistics - I
do language documentation and description work with Tibetic language
communities in Nepal, but I’m also interested in co-speech gesture, and I’ve
written about language on the internet, including a paper on the linguistics
of LOLcats with Jill Vaughan and how emoji act as digital gestures with
Gretchen McCulloch. I'm not just interested in how language works, but also
how linguists work - which is why I’ve helped run Linguistics in the Pub in
Melbourne on-and-off over the last decade, and why I’ve enjoyed working with
the Linguistics Data Interest Group of the Research Data Alliance to publish
the Austin Principles of Data Citation in Linguistics and the Tromsø
Recommendations for Citation of Research Data in Linguistics.

If there is one thing I hope for the future of linguistics as a field, it
would be that we do a better job of keeping those who studied linguistics
feeling connected to the discipline, and welcoming people who might never have
thought linguistics was for them. For the last five years I’ve been running
monthly interviews with people who have studied linguistics and gone on to
careers in a wide range of fields. Regardless of whether their work relates to
linguistics topic-wise, each person mentions the analytical and communication
skills they gained through studying linguistics. We train far more linguists
than there will ever be academic linguistics jobs for–as someone who is still
precariously employed almost eight years after graduating, I feel this all too
keenly. We therefore have an obligation to be more explicit in teaching our
students how the skills they are learning are relevant to a wide range of life
paths, and to celebrate the idea that being a linguist is more than just an
industry title.

--

Thanks for reading and if you want to donate to the LINGUIST List, you can do
so here: https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
All the best,
-the LL Team






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