Meet some linguistics students; find out about program activities:

The founding meeting of the Brooklyn College Linguistics Club took place on November 29th, 2011, and the club officers were elected: Victoria Wagnerman (President); Jackie Anzaroot (Vice-President); Emory Sullivan (Secretary); Matthew Corazzelli and Michael Perez (co-Treasurers). Also in attendance were Fiona Chan, Erwin Chua, David Beagle, Cleshawn Montague, and Profs. Gonsalves and Patkowski. Preliminary planning for club events next semester was also on the agenda.

Several linguistics majors (as well as students from other departments at Brooklyn College) presented at the HULLS (Hunter Undergraduate Linguistics and Language Studies) Conference on May 7th. The event was very well attended, as can be seen in the first shot below of Roy Wells discussing "Common Problems Between Japanese and English." On the lower-left, we have Victoria Wagnerman ("The Formulaic Language Proficiency of Well-Educated Non-Native English Speakers"), and on the lower right Prof. Cavanaugh with three of her students, Agnieszka Stypulkowska (Anthropology), Maja Leodardsen Musum (Film Production), and Ingrid Feeney (Linguistics) who presented on "'Disco Sticks' and 'Catcher's Mitts': Gender and Terms for the Genitals Among New Yorkers." The insert shows Gulbarchyn Kyshtobaeva (Speech) whose topic was "The Characteristics of Nouns and Verbs in Kyrgyz: Evidence from Child and Adult Language Production."

Prof. Barrière, Lilach Gez (Speech major/Linguistics minor), and Tami Mor (an M.A. student from Queens College and the first author on the project), gave a poster presentation at the CUNY Graduate Center's Student Research Day in Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences on April 15th. The topic was "Emergent Literacy in Bilingual Hebrew/English Preschoolers." Lilach served as a research assistant on this project, along with Naomi Baine (Linguistics major) who was unable to attend the event. She greatly enjoyed hearing other students and professors present their research, meeting several Graduate Center faculty members, and "exploring and finding my own niche while seeing how others have developed their careers in the field."

Several students met in the linguistics office on Feb 17, 2011 for a little get together and brief presentations by Profs. Patkowski and Gonsalves in preparation for the trek to the CUNY Graduate Center to attend Noam Chomsky's talk "On Problems of Projection." (Yes, yes, bare phrase structure was discussed too, despite the X-bar diagram on the board).

(from bottom left, clockwise: Roy Wells, Victoria Wagnerman, Jacqueline Anzaroot, Erwin Chua, Prof. Patkowski, Emory Sullivan, Fiona Chan, Cleshawn Montague, Tommy Denby, Prof. Gonsalves, and Naomi Baine - Victoria Bagirova joined the gang at the Graduate Center)

A few brief reactions: Tommy was struck by "Chomsky's deep sense that the world presents itself to him as a series of puzzles, and that every time a question is answered, another pops up." Along similar lines, Roy was taken with Chomsky adjunction to "be puzzled by simple things," and added that "it is what we take for granted that becomes most interesting once we take a closer look, something I am personally discovering through linguistics." Victoria found his argument "that language is designed primarily for internal computation and function… and isn't particularly efficient for conveying meaning externally" surprising yet compelling. Erwin was greatly impressed by his lack of pretension, "by how humble he is despite his intelligence."

Shauna Payne finished up her last requirement for the linguistics major in spring 2010 by taking the independent study course LIN 84.1 (now LING 4001W) for which she researched the history and current status of Papiamento, a creole which is the official language of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao. She is currently employed at JetBlue in airport operations (ticket counter work, gate operations); she also gets to fly around quite a lot (she recently returned from a trip to Honduras). She expects that her BA in linguistics will a make her a strong candidate for a position as a technical writer at JetBlue, a position which involves putting together and reviewing official documents for the company's usage and one which she is very interested in obtaining.

Jillian Justh, who enjoys writing, poetry, travel, and languages, completed her double major in linguistics and Spanish in spring 2010 and is planning to put her degree to immediate use. She will be moving to Bogota, Colombia, where she will obtain the CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults), an internationally recognized TESL/TEFL qualification which is awarded by Cambridge University. She then plans to remain in Colombia for some time teaching at a language center or university. Her longer term plans remain open, but may well involve seeking employment in law enforcement (and as noted by the Linguistic Society of America, law enforcement agencies do regularly recruit linguists).