Clara Cohen: Internship at the School of Linguistics

My work asks how pronunciation varies as a function of syntax, morphology, and probabilistic usage patterns in language. Russian was an ideal language to use to investigate these questions, because of its rich morphosyntactic structure, and in the spring of 2013 I spent a month at the Higher School of Economics collecting pronunciation data from native Russian speakers. The experience was rewarding on many different levels. I was warmly welcomed and included in the academic life of the city: I attended a conference at the HSE in which the linguistics students presented their research and signed up to participate in my experiment; I met students and faculty from three different universities, in fields ranging from linguistics, to biology, to astronomy, and went all around the city to meet people in their homes, offices, and university buildings. At these meetings,  I collected pronunciation data that eventually went into my dissertation, and over the course of my visit I collected more data  faster than I had expected. As a result, I had almost an entire week at the end of my stay in which I was free to visit the marvelous collection of museums in Moscow. None of this – my data, my dissertation, my museum trips, my exposure to Russian culture – would not have been possible without the support I received from the HSE. I can only hope that in my future career I will have the opportunity to offer HSE researchers the same collaboration and support that they offered me when I was a graduate student.