[prestigious orchestra music]
Graduates, family members, friends, staff,
students and faculty.
Welcome to
the 2020 Colorado Linguistics
Graduate Recognition Ceremony,
otherwise known as Crisis Commencement.
My name is Laura A. Michaelis.
I am the Chair of CU Linguistics.
The scene you see behind
me is our beloved home,
the Hellems building,
which celebrated its Centennial last year,
or at least the middle part of it did.
It now sits empty,
awaiting our return,
maintained by our attentive janitorial
and groundskeeping staff.
We will return
and our alums,
our Forever Buffs will
always be welcomed to return.
It's still the most
beautiful campus in America,
at least in my opinion,
and you never really got
the chance to say goodbye.
In the meantime,
we will bear in mind
the words of our fifth
and longest serving
president George Norlin,
who was acting president
during the last great pandemic,
in 1918.
The university is not the campus,
not the buildings on the campus,
not the faculties,
not the students of any one time,
not one of these or all of them.
The university consists
of all who come into
and go forth from her halls
who are touched by her influence
and who carry on her spirit.
On behalf of the faculty and staff
of CU linguistics,
I congratulate you,
our 2020 graduates.
In this virtual ceremony,
we recognize the achievements
of CU linguistic students
and give you the opportunity
to honor the family
members, friends, teachers,
pets and community members
who have sustained you
throughout your studies at CU.
On this site,
you will find profiles
of our 2020 graduates,
as well as video content from faculty
in which faculty discussed
student research products
and accomplishments.
You will also hear congratulatory messages
from our Undergraduate Chair,
Professor Kira Hall,
and our Graduate Chair,
Professor Rebecca Scarborough.
Whether you earned a
BA, MA, MS or PhD degree
from CU linguistics,
you found your calling in this field
which finds our common humanity
in our common daily practice
talking with hands, keyboards or voices.
You also heeded a call.
You became part of a digital diaspora
and in so doing,
you help flatten the curve
and protect the most vulnerable among us.
Despite the distraction,
isolation, inconvenience and worry,
you persevered in your studies.
You went to class,
you met with your professors,
you met with your fellow students
and you probably felt spent
at the end of each day
by the illusory togetherness of Zoom.
You achieved things through adversity.
In this season of loss,
the loss of an in-person
graduation ceremony,
might seem the least of it.
But a graduation is important.
It is our link with all the
graduates who came before us,
particularly those whose
educations were disrupted
by world events
the way yours has been.
Buffs graduated shortly
after the 1918 pandemic,
when 119 Boulderites died.
during the Depression,
during World War II,
during the Vietnam War and so on.
They were tested the way you have been
and you stayed the course somehow,
the way they did.
Family and friends,
you have sustained our graduates,
supported them even from afar
and allowed them to reach this day.
Even more impressively,
you have done so without
understanding fully
what linguists do
or what linguistics is good for.
That's very generous of you,
but you still deserve an
answer to one basic question.
What is linguistics anyway?
Our graduates have become very adept
at answering this question,
but I'll try to answer
it today nonetheless.
Our students are in this field
because they want to explore language
as a fundamental component of
human perception and cognition
our meaning-making capacity
and our social identity.
Our students are in general
really good at what they do,
so please hug your
graduates if only virtually.
Their talents and interests
span many aspects of this field.
I wanna mention in particular
that the majority,
the vast majority of our BA graduates,
have an interdisciplinary focus.
96% of them are graduating today,
either with a double
major or with a minor.
Their other major departments include,
speech language and hearing science,
computer science,
German psychology,
anthropology, economics, Spanish,
Japanese philosophy and classics.
And if you wonder why I put SLHS
and computer science first,
it's because they are also
having virtual graduations.
So shout out to them.
Our faculty and students,
live this interdisciplinary commitment
in their scholarly lives.
Because the study of language bridges
several scientific disciplines,
natural and social.
The study of language is inseparable
from the study of human
origins and sociality learning,
including machine learning,
general cognition,
and even human genetics,
as linguists study the link
between human dispersal
and language evolution.
Linguistics also has undeniable roots
in the humanities
because there are strong connections
between language and culture.
We study the ordinary linguistic faculties
that those of extraordinary
attainment leverage
and exploit in artistic works.
If you want further evidence
of how many different research streams
our undergraduate students combined,
you need look no further
than the lower up blog posts.
The students offering these blogs,
were each awarded a linguistics
undergraduate research award
for innovative work in a
linguistics course at CU Boulder.
Here's just a selection of the titles,
so we'll hear a lot more about
these from Professor Hall
in her message.
Maxed White wrote on
the semantic pejoration
of the Arabic phrase "Allahu Akbar".
Zachary Ryan wrote on
English to IPA translation
using a neural network.
Our majors are not merely
academic achievers,
but also learn their talents
through many projects.
I wanna recognize two such students.
BA, MA graduate, Megan Pielke
has received a Jacob Van
Ek Scholars Award for 2020.
This is an award given by the
College of Arts and Sciences
to students who have not only
superior academic achievement,
but also distinguished service
to the University of Colorado Boulder
and the community at large.
You'll hear more about that shortly
from Professor Raymond.
Congratulations Megan.
BA student, Maisa Nammari
is the 2020 winner
of the David S. Rood
Undergraduate Scholarship.
And I'm gonna hold up her award here
and hope you can see it.
So congratulations, Maisa.
You're going to get this award
which is signed by me and Kira and framed.
At some point I will
happily deliver it to you.
We have awarded this
scholarship since 2017.
It recognizes outstanding achievement,
as well as potential for
further success in linguistics.
The scholarship is named in
honor of professor David Rood,
who retired in 2016 after
48 years of teaching at CU.
He was known for his devotion
to undergraduate students
and undergraduate courses.
Maisa is not only a standout student
and a joy to have in class,
but she also has contributed in many ways
to our departmental community.
She was a member of our
Departmental Action Team,
which created our new
program of major tracks
and a shout out to other
student team members, Lauren,
who's graduating today.
Laura Nelson, LING club president elect,
Maureen Kosse, PhD student
and Jared Desjardins, PhD student.
She was co-organizer of the wonderful
David J. Peterson talk
on constructed languages.
And that is probably the
last major event we had,
before we all dispersed in March.
I'm gonna show you a
picture from an article,
in the Arts and Sciences Magazine
that was actually about this event.
And there we see Nadine Salvador
who's graduating today,
Lauren Nelson,
who is the president elect
of the Linguistics Club,
myself right there,
Maisa Nammari, third from the left
and Delaney Deskin outgoing
president in two senses.
Maisa was a passionate student organizer,
a very engaged in an organizer
of the Society for Linguistic
Anthropology Conference,
that has now been postponed,
but we hope will return to
Boulder sometime very soon.
Maisa even used her as
considerable graphic design talents
to create the conference logo.
Congratulations Maisa.
So what do linguists do?
Some linguists study the role of language
and social practice.
Some linguists study the
evolution of language
and ask what design features of language
reflect communicative
functions of language.
Some linguists examine
how children enter the world of culture
through mastery of the artifacts
and conventions of language.
Linguists study the influence
of language categories,
on our everyday thinking and behavior.
Linguists ask whether speakers
of different languages,
have different ways of thinking.
Linguists also study the
acoustics of sound waves
and how people perceive sounds.
We use this knowledge about
how people process speech
to build better computer programs
for automatic speech recognition.
In addition,
we use semantic analysis to build programs
that perform web searches,
automate translation,
extract information
and answer queries.
We create grammars of
undocumented languages
and develop language
revitalization programs,
for example, in native
American communities.
And if I can say a quick word,
about the devastating effect of COVID-19
on Navajo communities,
I will say that if you
were weighing causes
to give to during this crisis,
that is a very good one
to consider right now.
My Navajo syntax collaborator, Jalon Begay
would be embarrassed.
I think that I mentioned this,
but I know he would also be very grateful.
So graduates, what kind
of work will you do?
The world is an even
more troubled place now,
than it was when you
started your CU education.
But I believe the world
needs your contributions
more than ever.
The secretary general of the UN,
Antonio Gutierrez recently said,
our common enemy is COVID-19,
but our enemy is also an
infodemic of misinformation.
To overcome the Coronavirus,
we need to urgently
promote facts and science,
hope and solidarity,
over despair and division.
Who better to fight the infodemic,
than linguists?
We know that new facts have a
way of being either absorbed
or disregarded,
when people see a different problem,
excuse me, where people
see a given problem
through conflicting conceptual lenses.
We also know the power of metaphor.
And of course CU leadership,
is very fond of buffalo imagery.
So I'm gonna indulge in some of that here.
Remember, you have a
vast expanse to wander,
but you are part of our herd.
Together, we are buff strong.
In the words of the New Orleans charge,
wherever you are at work,
there is the university at work.
Please stay well,
stay aware
and stay tuned for more video content,
following this message.
Hello linguistics graduates
and those of you watching here
to celebrate those graduates.
I'm so pleased at the opportunity
to offer my congratulations to all of you
and as a graduate advisor
to offer an especially
hearty congratulations
to our MA, BA, MA, BAM,
MS classic and PhD grads.
It's been my privilege to teach you,
advise you,
to work alongside you
and to benefit from the
energy and bright insight
that all of you have
brought to the department.
We're especially proud and pleased
that the graduate school
has also recognized
several of our students for
their excellence this year.
And I'd like to mention
just a few of these honors.
Marcus Avelar, now, Dr. Avelar,
was awarded a graduate school
dissertation completion fellowship.
Jared Darden received
a graduate school summer
dissertation fellowship
and Evan Coles Harris was recognized
with a graduate school GPTI
teaching excellence award.
Congratulations.
The department would also
like to recognize the above
and beyond hard work and
excellence of everyone
of our graduate student teachers,
working as TA's and
instructors this semester.
Their dedication and innovation
in the face of the sudden
shift to remote learning,
was nothing short of brilliant.
And all of us here in the department
from the undergrads in their courses
to the faculty,
are grateful for everything
that we've learned from you.
As you finish your work here,
I hope that you move
confidently into the world,
knowing that language is
the key to connection,
whether we're altogether
or separated by social distancing.
And your expertise is valuable
and indeed essential.
And we have every confidence
that you will do interesting
and important things.
Congratulations linguists and best wishes.
Hello, my name is Kira Hall
I'm Chair of Undergraduate Studies
and I just wanna say how proud I am
of this graduating class.
This is a stellar,
stellar group of seniors
who are celebrating today.
I think our only regret here as faculty,
is that we can't be with you
and with your families
to celebrate this momentous occasion
and of course all your
achievements and accomplishments.
We're so proud of you.
In lieu of that,
I just wanted to say a few words.
There is so much gratitude
I could say to this group.
They're such a stellar, stellar group.
But let me just mention a few names.
The LING Club officers
who have done so much work this year,
preparing events
and hosting socials.
Delaney Deskin is our outbound president,
Lauren Nelson is the president elect,
Nadine Salvador is graduating,
And Maisa Nammari,
all four of them were officers
and were remarkable.
And then we have another set of officers,
the ULA officers,
which is the Undergraduate
Linguistics Association.
That's Carolyn Olmsted,
Cameron Sojak
and Jewel Ornelas.
And finally,
we have a really group
of innovative students
who worked on the DAT.
Well it's a Departmental Action Committee
that we work together to design new tracks
for the undergraduate
program in linguistics.
And we had a lot of super
undergraduates working with that.
Lauren Nelson,
Lauren Hoos
and again Maisa Nammari.
Just super work.
Finally, I just wanted to mention that,
of our graduating seniors,
we have some who also won
the LURA Awards this year.
LURA stands for Linguistics
Undergraduate Research Award
and these are students
who've been nominated
by professors for outstanding work
they did in their classes.
And they produce a blog
about that research program.
We are gonna release that blog
in the next couple of weeks,
but I'm proud to announce
some of the winners here,
who are graduating.
That would be Sabrina Cohen with her blog,
You are What You Speak,
Carolyn Olmsted,
you'll hear about her in another video,
How to Do Things with Memes.
Jewel Ornelas,
Ice Bay through the Lens
of Twitter Politics.
Maya Stephens,
Of Presidents and Obama
Face Politics and Memers.
And finally, Caitlin Schwartz,
Who Did what the duck,
correcting text messages.
These are really, really supersmart,
clever, interesting blogs
and I encourage you all to read them,
when they're released.
So just in closing,
I want to just leave you
with the esteemed opinion of the faculty
on this particular group
of graduating seniors.
And it goes something like this,
CU Boulder seniors in linguistics rock!
So proud of you all [giving a kiss],
and we know you're gonna
go on to do great things.
Congratulations.
I'm professor Chase Raymond
and I have the honor of presenting,
one of our BA, MA graduates this year,
Megan Pielke.
In addition to her
undergraduate honors thesis,
examining one-on-one English
language tutoring sessions,
which she defended last year.
Megan was selected this year
as a recipient of the
Jacob Van Ek Scholarship.
This is one of the College
of Arts and Sciences
highest honors
and recognizes exceptional undergraduates
who excel in their academics
and meaningfully contribute
to the University of Colorado Boulder
and the community.
Megan's work with the
department's Literacy Program
and the Student-Worker
Alliance Program, SWAP,
in addition to her strong
academic achievements
that made her an ideal
candidate for the Van Ek Award
and we were so pleased
to see her selected.
We're lucky that Megan
will be sticking around
to see you this upcoming year
as a graduate student in the Department
of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences.
Congratulations Megan.
Hello, I'm Kira Hall
and this year I had the pleasure
of advising Carolyn Olmsted
in her senior honors thesis.
Every once in a while an
undergraduate student comes along
who shows you a world
that you never knew existed.
And this was the case
with Carolyn Olmsted.
Her thesis,
if I may,
is titled: How to Do Things with Memes:
Creating Community through
the Sociopragmatics
of Star Wars Prequel Memes.
It's a brilliant thesis.
Carolyn applies all the
tools of sociolinguistics
to really understand what these memes
are doing linguistically
as well as how they create identity.
It's a fun, funny thesis
and Carolyn, I'm so proud of you.
Congratulations.
I'm Laura A. Michaelis
and I was Kieran Britt's
linguistics honors thesis advisor.
I specify linguistics honors thesis
because he wrote two
different honors thesis
in two different departments.
The first student,
to my knowledge,
to have done this.
His philosophy honors
thesis was an epistemology.
It was entitled, Against Equal Treatment
and Professor Matthias
Steup was his advisor.
His linguistics thesis was entitled
Linguistic Factors Underlying Quantify
or Scope Disambiguation.
He received a summa cum
laude degree designation
for each of these theses.
He also graduated with distinction.
Kieran received the David S.
Rood Scholarship last spring,
as well as the Lamont Scholarship,
awarded by the Philosophy Department.
For his linguistics honors thesis,
Kieran took on an enduring question,
in natural language semantics.
What readings were possible in sentences
with multiple quantifiers?
Quantifiers are words
like every, each and ah.
Semanticists developed theories
to capture the range of possible readings
for such sentences.
For example, the sentence,
every doctor talked to a patient,
has two readings,
one in which there are multiple patients
and one in which there's
just a single patient.
The job of a semanticist is to argue
that this sentence is truly ambiguous.
That is, it has two possible readings,
depending on which quantifies
or we think of first,
and to capture the ambiguity
by providing adequate
representations for those readings.
Semantic theories,
however, cannot tell us
which of the two readings
of an ambiguous sentence
we are likely to get in context.
And this is the question
that Kieran took on
in his honors thesis.
Kieran's account unites
the semantic study of scope
with the pragmatic
study of context of use.
Kieran is intellectually fearless.
He targets hard problems.
He reads widely and well.
He raises the right questions
and he's always prepared
with counterexamples.
It was a pleasure to work with him.
Kieran will enter the
philosophy department's
bachelor's accelerated
master's program in the fall.
He hopes eventually to enter a philosophy,
PhD program,
and to become an academic philosopher.
Congratulations Kieran
Fallon E. Hovland,
has completed her master of
arts degree in linguistics,
this spring
with the filing of her thesis,
Plautdietsch in contact,
how contact with English and Spanish
has influenced Plautdietsch speakers,
in Seminole, Texas.
Fallon is an enterprising researcher,
who didn't shy away from
challenges she faced,
in the course of her research
on the low German language
spoken in the Mennonite
community of Seminole, Texas.
Her research required ingenuity
and some serious gutsiness.
Beginning with the trilingual
field work she undertook,
in a notoriously insular community.
Fallon made the most of the data
she collected in this community.
Tracing the histories of loan words
and identifying sound change
in progress in Plautdietsch.
Her thesis demonstrates quite clearly,
the contact-induced language change,
is not nearly the
consequence of outside forces
acting on a language,
but also a function of
the sociocultural changes
within communities
and evolving language ideologies.
It's been a pleasure to be involved
in the incredible work
that Fallon has done this semester.
And I look forward to seeing
what she does with her
interest in linguistics
and an in Germanic
languages in the future.
Congratulations Fallon.
I am very happy to join you today
along with the birds in my backyard,
to celebrate the PhD
and dissertation of my
student, Marcus Avelar.
Marcus's work is in the area
of linguistic anthropology,
which is a field that looks
at language on the ground
as used by people in everyday social life.
And the particular combination of language
and social life that he's interested in,
picks place in San Paulo, Brazil.
In a religion called Umbanda.
So if I may,
Marcus's dissertation is
entitled Urban Spirits,
Language, Race and Modernity,
among Umbandistas in San Paulo, Brazil.
Umbanda is a Brazilian
spiritualist religion.
And it's a widely
discussed an anthropology
for its syncretism,
of African indigenous
and European religions.
Marcus is interested in the way,
practitioners of this religion,
speakers of Portuguese,
appeal to nationalist
ideals of racial democracy
to position their religion as modern.
Thus makes a great contribution
to research in the area
of language and race
and language and modernity.
It's a fantastic dissertation.
In fact, one of his committee members
at the defense called it a page-turner,
which is something that
you don't often hear.
Now, Marcus has gone off to
bigger and better things.
He is in a prestigious postdoc
at Florida International University,
where he is studying uses
of Spanish and Portuguese
in the Miami area.
So with that I wanna carry out,
one of academia's most
hallowed performatives,
otherwise known as the
doctoral hooding ceremony.
So I have here a hood.
Marcus,
here we go.
Sorry I can't be there in person, but,
you are here by hooded.
I'm so proud of you.
You're magnificent
and you're gonna go on to
do such magnificent things.
I'm Laura A. Michaelis
and I was Tao Lin's doctoral
dissertation advisor
along with professor Martha Palmer.
Tao's thesis,
which he successfully defended last fall,
is entitled automatic classification
of verb direction constructions
in Mandarin Chinese.
It focuses on Mandarin verb direction,
constructions or VDCs,
a class of serial verb constructions
that express complex events,
both literal and metaphorical.
An example is,
and I'll read you the translation
and not the original Mandarin Chinese,
the French team kicked,
entered the side game.
What this means is that the French team,
kicked their way into the final.
This sentence asserts
the kicking is the means
by which the French
team entered the final.
A machine translation
system will be required
to compute the relationship
between the two events,
construe the first as
the cause of the second
and choose an appropriate
English construction
as the translation.
In this case,
the way construction,
as in kick one's way.
Tao's goal was to create
a machine learning system
that can achieve a
human-level understanding
of sentences like this,
and potentially improve the performance
of NLP applications like
Chinese machine translation,
natural language reasoning,
and event detection.
This research made two
primary contributions.
First it established
linguistic analysis of VDCs,
based on events, structure and metaphor.
It included taxonomies of event types.
Second,
based on the
linguistically-motivated categories
that developed an automated method
of semantic classification
for the constructions,
surpassing the scope of
classification resources
previously devised within Chinese NLP.
After defending his thesis,
Tao accepted a position
as a computational linguist
at Milestone Technologies,
a worldwide managed services provider
with over 2000 employees.
In this position,
Tao was using conversational agents,
like Amelia and Google Assistant,
to create natural dialogues
for different clients
and contribute to research, design,
data cleaning, coding
and evaluation of NLP-related components
of wider AI projects.
Tao was working out of the
Phoenix, Arizona offices.
I'll miss my many discussions with Tao.
I'll miss his linguistic insights.
He was a scholar of classical Chinese
before turning his sights to
computational linguistics.
His kindness,
his humor,
his patience
and his helpfulness.
I learned so much about
Chinese grammar from him.
I am glad his talents
are being recognized.
Congratulations Tao.
Hi, I'm Martha Palmer
and I'm presenting this
PhD to Tim O'Gorman.
Tim was a delight as a student,
the entire time he was
here for his master's,
working as a research assistant
and then finally as a PhD student.
He worked on linguistic annotation
for English and Arabic,
tools for language documentation
of Arapaho and Lakota
and became as adept at
programming and machine learning
as he has at linguistic analysis.
For a term project,
he first gave handcrafted syntactic parses
to 50 biomedical journal articles
and then studied the syntactic contexts
of the verbs in those sentences.
He found verbs like insert and inject,
that like put,
put the book on the table,
have to specify the location role.
They have to give the place for something.
Usually a drug retool,
is being inserted or injected.
This foreshadowed his
pathbreaking dissertation topic,
bringing together computational
and linguistic models of
implicit role interpretation.
Here he applied the same techniques
to one of the hardest
problems in linguistics.
Those arguments are roles
that can be omitted.
As in, "Come to lunch with us?"
"I already ate.
In fact, my stomach has
been a bit dodgy ever since,
so I hope it didn't
give me food poisoning."
The it, refers to what was eaten,
which was never actually mentioned.
It was implicit.
Tim did the same beautiful,
meticulous job on this,
that he did on everything.
He's now doing a well-earned pest doc
at the University of Massachusetts
with Andrew McCallum,
developing new machine learning paradigms
for natural language processing
that make effective use of linguistics.
Congratulations, Tim.
Hi, I'm Martha Palmer
and I'm presenting a PhD to Kevin Stowe.
Kevin earned an MA in
computational linguistics
at Indiana University
and showed up on our doorstep one day,
looking for a job.
He made significant
programming contributions
to several projects here at CU
aimed at developing lexical resources
like online dictionaries
for computers basically,
namely WordNet and probank,
before he decided he
was ready to do a PhD.
For most of his time as a PhD student,
he was the mainstay of
two large NSF projects
that examines how people
behave during disasters
like floods, hurricanes, wildfires,
and whether that behavior
can be identified
and even predicted by
studying their tweets.
Kevin led all of the
linguistic annotation efforts
on those projects
and also used machine learning
to train classifiers
that tried to predict things
like whether folks in a hurricane's path
were likely to evacuate.
That could easily have
been his dissertation.
But instead,
Kevin chose to tackle an
even thornier problem,
automatically detecting
and accurately categorizing
our use of metaphors.
In his excellent dissertation,
syntactic and semantic improvements
to computational metaphor processing,
Kevin showed the important
role that syntactic context,
especially argument structure
as captured by WordNet,
plays in our ability to
identify and analyze metaphors.
For instance,
hemorrhage only takes an object
when it's being used metaphorically,
as in small businesses are
hemorrhaging cash right now.
Deciding it was time to check out Europe,
Kevin is now doing a postdoc
at the Technical University of Darmstadt
an outstanding site
for natural language
processing research in Germany.
Congratulations Kevin.
[prestigious orchestra music]
