Students Inaugurate Research Careers
During
Summer
Field
School
in Linguistics
During the First Summer Session of
2007, an innovative collaboration between the CSU Interdisciplinary Program in
Linguistics and the Department of Anthropology, with the support of the College
of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, provided four undergraduate majors in
Linguistics with a unique type of opportunity to make significant research
contributions which at other institutions would be available only to advanced graduate
students. Dr. Lewis, together with Dr. Barbara Hoffman, then Director of
Linguistics, and Dr. Paul Aspelin, Interim Chair of Anthropology, conceived and
developed a new program wherein students would simultaneously receive
intensive training in research methodology, and then immediately apply their
newly-acquired knowledge, skills and techniques to an ongoing research
project of cross-disciplinary significance.[1]
As participants in CSU's inaugural Summer
Field School in Descriptive Linguistics, conducted by Dr. Lewis, the
students thus received intensive training in the essential research
methods used by linguists to reveal the grammatical and semantic structures of
languages with which a researcher has little prior familiarity. Armed
with these new techniques, the four students then changed hats each day
and served as Research Assistants in Dr. Lewis' research
project on The Grammatical
Structuring of Motion Events in Ewe and Gen . To pursue
this initiative, the four Research Assistants along with Dr. Lewis met
daily in extended elicitation sessions with Dedo Mawuli,
a native speaker of Ewe, who is also a CSU student. The students and Dr.
Lewis would then re-convene daily for a de-briefing session, to analyze
the day's findings, discuss their implications and plan and prioritize the
agenda for the next day's elicitation session. The students were thus
given shared responsibility for research design as well as execution of
the investigative protocols and interpretation of the data.
The success of the