Scott AnderBois spent several weeks in Ecuador with A'i colleagues working on several different projects including work on the conjunction, attitude verbs and a new project on the phonetics and phonology of laryngeals with Ryan Bennett and Chelsea Sanker. In support of the latter project, the team MacGyvered together a temporary sound dampened recording space. They also put on a workshop on software for creating and translating children’s books in A’ingae.
Most of the time there, though, was dedicated to continued work on the A'ingae dictionary. In addition to adding new entries and editing the 3,500+ existing entries, the team planned out the next steps for recording audio and creating digital illustrations of words of particular cultural or environmental interest (supported by AnderBois' 2026 Salomon Award). Undergraduate Sophia Barki also presented to the team virtually about her work in progress (supported by the UTRA and Laidlaw Scholars programs) writing a section with information on parts of speech to include in the grammatical part of the dictionary.
Jaime Benheim has a new publication out in the Journal of English Linguistics: Benheim, Jaime (2026). Style in sound change: Chicago adolescents' social evaluations of the Northern Cities Shift. Journal of English Linguistics, OnlineFirst.
This study uses a matched guise task paradigm to assess Chicago adolescents' social evaluations of an ongoing local sound change. Results show that adolescents are aware of the community-level distribution of the change, reflecting the class- and age-linked patterning of the Northern Cities Shift in Chicago. (Students who are interested in learning to run experimental perception studies like this should take LING 1615: "Sociolinguistic Cognition" this fall!).
Peter Grishin spent a couple of weeks in Maine in August, meeting and working with Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey speakers and community members from Sipayik (Pleasant Point, ME) and Neqotkuk (Tobique First Nation, NB). In addition to strengthening community ties, Grishin worked with speakers to investigate the properties of different kinds of applicatives in the language (verbal morphemes that add an additional object argument), as well as to investigate the properties of different kinds of movement dependencies. He also published a new paper in the Canadian Journal of Linguistics (Vol. 70, Issue 2, pp. 204–263) titled "Clause size, cross-clausal dependencies, and the left periphery". This paper argues that apparently complex interactions between cross-clausal agreement and wh-movement into and out of different kind of clausal complements in Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey are neatly explained once we understand the internal structure of different kinds of complement clauses: complements of verbs like ’kocicihtun ‘know’ are full phasal CPs, direct perception complements are reduced, non-phasal CPs, and complements of verbs like ’pawatomon ‘want’ are bare TPs. This work contributes to the growing body of literature investigating issues of clause size crosslinguistically, and in addition shows how "local" syntactic properties inside an embedded clause can have knock-on effects on cross-clausal syntactic phenomena.
An understanding of linguistic principles has many applications to legal proceedings. To that
end, Polly Jacobson in partnership with UTRA fellow Jessica Lee, spent much of the summer
developing a new course Language and the Law (LING 1081) to explore many of these
interactions. This course will be taught in fall 2026, and requires no prior linguistic background.
PhD student Jooyoung Lee presented her thesis in late July. The thesis, titled "Resolving Adverbial Ambiguity: Formal and Corpus-Based Approaches to Interpretive Flexibility" was advised by Scott AnderBois (together with committee members Uriel Cohen Priva and affiliate faculty member Kyuwon Moon). It explores several case studies probing the boundaries between manner adverbs and other adverbial categories in Korean and in English. The successful defense was followed by cake and a sparking töst! Congrats Jooyoung!
