Funded by the Graduate School's new Summer Research Fellowship Program, she spent this past summer in Dagestan, a small republic in the Northeast Caucasus Mountains of Russia. There she carried out research on Tsez, a local language spoken only by about 6,000 people.
(Media-Newswire.com) - Not many graduate students are brave or fortunate enough to conduct their research half way around the world, far from their native language and culture. Annie Gagliardi, a second-year linguistics graduate student at the University of Maryland, is one of the fearless, lucky few.
Funded by the Graduate School's new Summer Research Fellowship Program, she spent this past summer in Dagestan, a small republic in the Northeast Caucasus Mountains of Russia. There she carried out research on Tsez, a local language spoken only by about 6,000 people.
"Looking at this small language that not that many people have thought about is what we're trying to do to understand how language works," said Gagliardi. "What I want to do in my research is incorporate as many languages as I can, because I think there's something to learn from all of them."
By studying many diverse languages, like Tsez, linguists hope to discover general mechanisms of language learning that can be applied many areas of language science.
"Specifically, I want to know what information children are using to learn how nouns are categorized," she said.
In Tsez, as in very many other languages, nouns fall into categories. Adjectives and verbs take on different forms, depending on the category of the noun that they combine with. A familiar example is the categorization of masculine and feminine nouns in Spanish.[click here to hear audio]
Gagliardi has studied Spanish, Russian, Italian, German, Portugese, Swahili, and Quechua. Though she spoke mostly Russian while in Dagestan, she picked up some Tsez that she hopes to build on for future visits.
"I pick up languages pretty easily," she said, "partly because I really enjoy it."
Gagliardi first became interested in languages during her year as a high school exchange student in Ecuador. When she went to college she expanded her repertoire of languages and discovered a passion for linguistics. She came to the University of Maryland as the first member of the University's Baggett Fellows program, which allows outstanding graduates to gain a year of intensive research experience prior to graduate study. Linguistics faculty were impressed with her research during that year so they recruited her to stay in Maryland to pursue her PhD.
Gagliardi is one of the first cohort of graduate students to receive competitive fellowships under Maryland's new NSF-supported IGERT program in language science. Under the IGERT program, Gagliardi is pursuing a computational/neuromodeling track, where she completes coursework both in the linguistics and computer science departments.
"The IGERT is giving me computer science tools that will expand the scope of what I can do and broaden the range of people I can talk to about my work," she said. "I hope to end up being someone who has a variety of techniques for exploring languages."
The new IGERT grant awarded to the program by the NSF will enhance collaboration between other University of Maryland departments involved in language science and will support collaborations with institutions in other countries. This interdisciplinary research is attractive to highly qualified prospective students like Gagliardi.
"When I was deciding to come here, this department really stood out because people were interested in working together not only within the department, but also across departments," said Gagliardi. "This brings in methodologies, ideas and ways of thinking about problems that you wouldn't get just in linguistics."
Seminars, new coursework, and interdepartmental projects are other ways the IGERT program will bring graduate students and faculty together from diverse departments.
"[This collaboration] makes you realize that what you're saying in your research is going to have to fit into this much bigger picture," she said. "You get different perspectives that help you learn how to formulate your questions in a way that will be interesting not only to linguists, but to a greater circle of people."
Release Date
This story was released on 2008-11-18. Please make sure to visit the official company or organization web site to learn more about the original release date. See our disclaimer for additional information.
