CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

Faculty and students in the Department of Linguistic engage in research on a broad range of linguistic topics and languages. Much of this research is made possible by our extensive laboratory facilities, as well as other resources available on and off campus. Students and occasionally faculty members and visiting scholars as well publish ongoing work in our Working Papers in Linguistics. Below are descriptions of some long-term, ongoing, collaborative research projects in the department.

• Action and Perception Representations in Language Understanding is a joint project of the University of Hawaii and U.C. Berkeley. This project conducts research on whether humans use neural structures responsible for motor control and sensory perception when understanding language that literally or figuratively pertains to action or perception. There are two major componenents of this project: experimental research, including fMRI and behavioral studies; and computational modeling. Local lead investigator: Ben Bergen, bergen at hawaii dot edu (replace "at" with "@" and "dot" with ".").
• Research and resources on Austroasiatic languages - Munda languages of South Asia and Mon-Khmer, Aslian, and Nicobarese languages of South-East Asia - are at the Austroasiatic web site maintained by David Stampe (stampe at hawaii dot edu), and Patricia J. Donegan (donegan at hawaii dot edu).
  Our research on Austroasiatic, and particularly Munda, has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution, and the American Institute for Indian Studies.
• The Austronesian Comparative Dictionary was funded by the National Science Foundation from 1990-1995, and provided support for three graduate students. Slightly over 2,000 pages of analyzed (but not fully edited) comparative lexical and morphological data were collected during this time. This material represents more than 5,100 proposed cognate sets, including base morphemes, and reconstructable affixed, reduplicated and compounded words. Material is drawn from over 200 languages. Work continues on this project. Even in its current, incomplete form, it probably is the largest comparative dictionary in existence. Principal Investigator: Bob Blust, at blust at hawaii dot edu.
• Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG) is a recent theory of grammar, which combines insights from Cognitive Grammar and Construction Grammar, and integrates them, along with other cognitive mechanisms such as image-schemas, frames, metaphor, mental spaces, and blending, in a neurally plausible computational formalism. ECG is being developed principally by researchers at U.C. Berkeley and the University of Hawaii. Local lead investigator: Ben Bergen, bergen at hawaii dot edu.
• The SPOT language-production game-task is a collaborative research project involving researchers in New Zealand and the USA. The project is an investigation of how naive speakers use prosody (speech intonation and rhythm) to clarify the meaning of sentences, and how listeners make use of these cues to recover the intended meaning. The game task allows speakers to produce a range of linguistically interesting sentences in a quasi-spontaneous fashion (instead of reading them aloud, for example). The task also allows manipulation of the likelihood of one sentence interpretation vs. another, for example for investigations of whether players increase their use of prosodic cues in ambiguous situations and decrease them in unambiguous situations. Used in conjunction with head-mounted eyetracking , the task allows assessment of the incremental use of prosodic information during sentence comprehension. Local lead investigator: Amy Schafer, aschafer at hawaii dot edu.