When I was very young, holidays with my mother’s family always meant the entire, extremely large extended family in upstate South Carolina. I remember my mom taking me aside after Thanksgiving one year and telling me that I couldn’t talk like her family if I wanted to be “a professional” one day. Unknown to her, this one act of linguistic prescriptivism started a lifelong fascination with language–especially the little things that make everyone’s language usage uniquely theirs.
At the start of my undergraduate education at the University of Tennessee, I had largely sidelined my linguistic interests in favor of more “realistic” pursuits like physics. In an ironic twist, my “unrealistic” passion for theatre was what brought me back to linguistics when an acting class introduced me to the International Phonetic Alphabet. This rekindled my interest in how people learn not just languages, but also accents and dialects. I promptly enrolled in a few classes from our tiny Linguistics Program and shortly changed my major. Despite the program’s unassuming size, I found a great many talented people with a passion for linguistics, which inspired a similar passion in me.
I feel that same passion among the faculty, staff, and students in PSU’s Department of Applied Linguistics. After I was accepted at PSU in 2023, I quickly found that many different subfields of applied linguistics piqued my interest. While language teaching is extremely interesting to me–and I intend to teach at least one language myself one day–I am particularly interested in breaking down the small, contextual nuances of language use. This is especially true when those nuances are related to the power dynamics of an organization, society, or culture.
In just one short year, this department has massively broadened my perspective on how linguistic knowledge can be applied to social situations. With the experience gained from participating in research groups like LiDA, I have begun to develop my thesis on discourses of power within university communications surrounding the mass wave of student protests in the spring of 2024. After being exposed to the many possibilities of corpus linguistics through Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis by Dr. Paul Baker of Lancaster University, I have decided to create a custom corpus to enable the study of a large number of texts while still retaining the ability to delve into word-level detail. I would love to use this thesis as a foundation for further work in the realm of Computer-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS).
As the proud recipient of the Nattinger Scholarship, I am extremely grateful to have more financial freedom to focus on my research goals. With the flexibility to spend more time on my studies, I also have the opportunity to learn skills that will help me intertwine linguistic analysis and cutting-edge technological advancements, all while applying the results to critical social issues facing the world today.