As part of the UTRA program, Luca Iallonardi ('25) and Talia Sherman ('26) conducted summer research on language change in Rhode Island and New England, including a case study on lifespan change in the use of several regional variables by Senators Reed and Whitehouse of Rhode Island. Though it is often assumed that speakers are stable in their linguistic production once they reach adulthood, more recent work examining longitudinal data has found that this is not always the case, and many speakers do shift their productions over time -- exactly the pattern that was observed for these Senators. Iallonardi and Sherman presented the results of this work at the Student Summer Research Symposium in August.

Additionally, this past spring, Adia Colvin ('26) and Julia Dubnoff ('27) worked on a UTRA-funded research project exploring sociophonetic variation among Chicago-area adolescents. They coded a dataset of sociolinguistic interviews for alveolar v. velar realizations of ING, often considered a pan-regional feature in American English, and compared its use to that of raised/fronted TRAP, a feature local to Chicago. They found that the use of both features is conditioned by the interaction of gender and orientation to Chicago, which can inform our understanding of the role of "non-regional" features in place-linked linguistic styles.

Furthermore, in collaboration with the UTRA program and volunteering their time, Koda (Wenjing) Li, Moz Marchini and Claire Robertson have been conducting research with Polly Jacobson on "Discontinuous Constituents in Categorial Grammar".  A discontinuous constituent is one where material that intuitively goes together semantically is separated by other things in the syntax, like "Every elephant gets fed at 5 pm except Babar" where ('except Babar" modifies "every elephant").  Different theories of syntax have different accounts of these, but our team is exploring an idea inspired by the domain of morphology where many languages have 'infixes' as well as prefixes and suffixes (well known cases come from Philippine languages).  While everyone is engaged in all the aspects of the project, Claire has been focusing on the formal properties of such systems and also on some facts about word order in Japanese; Koda is focusing except phrases like the above and at similar cases in Mandarin, as well as looking at cases of overlapping discontinuities; and Moz has been focusing on the range of these processes cross-linguistically in morphology.  The group has discovered that the phenomena calls for an enrichment in the notion of syntactic categories. Their latest project is to worry about puzzling examples such as the following (said by a zookeeper to new employee):  "Every pig gets fed at five o'clock and every elephant gets fed at 6 o'clock except Porky and Babar".  The puzzle here is this: what does the 'except' phrase modify?  It is distributed over both the elephants and the pigs. Therefore, is the whole phenomenon here really about 'discontinuities'?