Honors Concentration
Linguistics concentrators with strong interests in linguistic research
and a strong academic record are encouraged to consider an Honors
Concentration in Linguistics. The Honors Concentration is intended to
provide students with an in-depth research experience, and students
who are considering graduate study (in linguistics or another
discipline) are especially encouraged to participate in the honors
program.
The Honors Thesis
The highlight of the honors concentration is the honors thesis, which
reports on original research conducted under the supervision of a
Linguistics faculty member. Students select their own thesis advisor,
based on their specific research interests. Many students are
introduced to faculty's research specializations through coursework,
but further information is also available on
faculty webpages;
students may also wish to consult Research and
Internship Opportunities. Attending talks and other
department events serves as
another introduction to linguistics research at Michigan.
Once a faculty member has agreed to serve as thesis advisor, student
and advisor work closely together to identify a thesis topic of mutual
interest. Students should begin this process in their junior year;
especially if the thesis involves experimentation or conducting
surveys, it is often necessary to spend time in the summer months
organizing what needs to be done in order to complete the project on
time. Ideally prior to the end of their junior year, honors students
should fill out the Linguistics Thesis Declaration; students also
declare an Honors Concentration in Linguistics with the College of LSA
Honors Office. Students may elect Linguistics 495 and 496 when
writing the honors thesis, but are not required to do so.
Honors theses by students graduating in Winter term commencement are
due on April 1, and otherwise are due one month before the date of
commencement. The thesis is read and evaluated independently by the
thesis advisor and by a second reader jointly selected by the student
and advisor. Students completing a double concentration may seek
Linguistics honors with or without honors in their other concentration
(or vice versa). Double concentrators who select joint honors may
choose to write a single thesis under the supervision of a joint
honors committee, consisting of the thesis advisors from both
programs. (It is the responsibility of the student to establish the
joint committee.) In this case, the advisor from the other
concentration serves as the second reader.
All honors thesis submitted in a given academic year are eligible to
compete for the Matt Alexander Award, awarded for the best honors
thesis in Linguistics at that year's Graduates Reception during
commencement weekend.
Honors Concentration Requirements
The Honors Concentration in Linguistics requires completion of the
requirements for the concentration and, in addition, a senior honors
project leading to the honors thesis. The thesis must receive an
"honors" evaluation by the thesis readers (the thesis advisor and
second reader). Honors concentrators must also meet the requirement
set by the College of LSA of a cumulative GPA of 3.4 or higher through
graduation.
Recent Honors Theses
2008-2009
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Rosalie Edmunds
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"They'll be doing away with those buffalo": Language, Culture, and History in a Salish-Pend d'Oreille Narrative.
Awarded 2009 Virginia Voss Award for excellence in writing by senior honors women.
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Charles Fletcher III
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La Lengua Rosa: A Sociolinguistic Study of Gay Spanish in Madrid.
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Alan Mishler
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Voice Onset Time in Japanese Voiceless Stops: Domain-initial Strengthening and Perceptual Salience.
Awarded 2009 Marshall Sahlins Social Science Award from LSA Honors and 2009 Matt Alexander Award for best honors thesis in Linguistics.
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Ania Musial
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Overcoming the Subset Problem: The Subset Problem and You, or, Maximum Entropy Modeling of L2 Phonotactic Acquisition.
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2007-2008
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Lauren Friedman
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The Loss of Old English Null Expletive 'it': How a Language Can Transform from One that Allows Null Expletives to One that Disallows them.
Awarded the 2008 Matt Alexander Award for best honors thesis in Linguistics and 2008 Virginia Voss Award for best honors thesis by a woman writer.
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Song Hee Kim
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Various Functions of the Discourse Marker "well" in selected Speech Events from Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English.
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Emma Caitlin Schroder
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The Status of Loanwords in Wolof.
Emma was awarded the Outstanding Achievement Award in Linguistics for her outstanding combination of scholarship and leadership in the undergraduate program.
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Justin Ryan Wedes
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Bare Necessities: A Quantitative Study of Bare Noun Frequency in Cape Verdean Creole.
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2006-2007
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Sehar Azad
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The Doctor's Orders: Prescription of Eighteenth-Century Grammarians and the Implications for the Written Language.
2007 Recipient of the Matt Alexander Award for the best honors thesis in Linguistics.
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Edward Cormany
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Syntactic Models for Coordination in English and Latin
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Louann Fang
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The Restaurant Workplace as a Discourse Community: A Case Study of Language Contact and Communication Ideology
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Alexa Feldman
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The Etymology, Use and Perception of Taboo Language
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Dave Kush
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Compound Interest: Applying a Serialization Phrase Structure to Hindi Verbal Compounds
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Caitlin Light
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German in the Diaspora: Commonalities in Emigrant Dialects
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Joseph F. Sawka
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Where Do Leading Questions Lead?: Working Toward a Linguistic Definition of Leading in Courtroom Discourse
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2005-2006
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Charles Crissman
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Incorporating Reference Time into a Binding Approach to
Sequence of Tense
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Kellan Cummings
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Contact, Malta: The ‘Language Question’ and its Implications for Linguistics Scholarship
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Nayana Dhavan
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A Non-Absolutive and Unified Movement Analysis of Hindi
Passives and Ergatives
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Jori Lindley
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Linguistic Motivations Behind ‘Incorrect’ Pronoun Forms in English Coordinate NPs
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Julia Malette
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A Sociolinguistic Case Study on Bilingual Education in Honduras
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Erika Picciotto
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Phonological Transfer in Second Language Acquisition
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2004-2005
| Natasha Abner
| Resultatives gone minimal
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| Sunny Park
| The Acquisition of the English Article System by Advanced Korean Learners of English
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| Samantha Sefton
| Nasals and Nasalization in American English: Implications for Theories of Coarticulation
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| Nina Simms
| Running head: Speaker Awareness and Prosodic Disambiguation
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| Dara Smith
| Sounding Male or Female Online: Perceived Indexes of Gender in Online Communication
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| Sarah Van Bonn
| French and English Journal Article Abstracts from General and Applied Lingusitcs: A Comparative Study
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2003-2004
| Erika Alpert
| The Role of Coarticulation in the Origin of Canadian Raising
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| Eriko Atagi
| Simply Accented or Simply Incomprehensible: A Study of the Factors Involved in the Perception of Accented Speech
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| Aaron Isley
| A Linguistic Account for Cult Phenomena
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| Max Montesino
| An OCP-Based Description of Nasal Harmony in Optimality Theory
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| Keli Rulf
| The Syntax, Semantics, and Early Acquisition of One
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2002-2003
| Jessica Cooke
| Does subcategorization frequency influence eye movements in a passive listening paradigm?
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| Kathleen Shaw
| A Study of the Acquisition of Variable Vowel Systems Among African American Children
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