Research Projects
This page demonstrates the research projects that students and faculty in the Department of Linguistics have conducted. As researchers, we believe in the importance of linguistics research for understanding human experience and we use interdisciplinary frameworks and tools to understand and support linguistic diversity. To highlight the interdisciplinary nature of linguistics, we begin this digital collection with the digital image of an oil painting, entitled "Connections" , by UIC undergraduate Lydia Limas (BS in Neuroscience) (used with permission).
"Connections" - a painting by Lydia Limas used with permission Heading link
Lovingly exploring any niche of the natural world leads an open mind to discover where we connect. As a student, I strive for that integrity to have the capacity to connect through a sense of universality.
| UIC undergraduate student in Neuroscience
Linguistic Identity and Literacy Landscape of a Multilingual Community in Chicago Heading link
“Linguistic Identity and Literacy Landscape of a Multilingual Community in Chicago .”
Researcher: Jill Hallett
This project focuses on how the literacy landscape reflects the home languages of students and families in one linguistically-diverse community in Chicago. It looks at how linguistic identity is indexed through the community literacy landscape and what language practices are present, privileged, and erased.
TweetTaglish: A Dataset for Investigating Tagalog-English Code-Switching Heading link
“TweetTaglish: A Dataset for Investigating Tagalog-English Code-Switching”
Researchers: Megan Herrera (undergraduate researcher) with co-authors/mentors Ankit Aich and Dr. Natalie Parde (UIC NLP Lab)
This project builds a Tagalog-English code-switching dataset constructed from social media data, using Twitter as a resource. Read the paper published in the Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022).
An Investigation of the Vitality and Perception Of the Ga language in the Ghanaian-American Community Heading link
“An Investigation of the Vitality and Perception Of the Ga language in the Ghanaian-American Community”
Undergraduate Student Researcher: Eli Nukunya
The Ga language is a Ghanaian language most commonly spoken by the Ga-Adangbe ethnic group in Ghana that has become spoken in the Ghanaian diaspora in recent history. As Ghanaians have created more immigrant communities in the diaspora, it is possible that the Ga language may suffer the same fate of many immigrant languages and lose its influence and importance within the Ghanaian-American community, especially among the younger generation. Through surveys and interviews, this study investigates Ghanaian-Americans’ connection to the Ga language along with how they view the Ga language and its importance in comparison to languages in the diaspora community.
Language of the Marketplace Heading link
“Language, Multimodal Interaction and Transaction: Studies of a Southern Chinese Marketplace.”
Researcher: Xuehua Xiang
This project examines multimodal interaction in the marketplace in a multilingual town at the juncture of urbanization in Southern China. By analyzing the socializing functions of language in the marketplace outside of and beyond economic dealings, the study additionally documents and depicts the roles of affect and morality in marketplace encounters.
Tools for Linguistic Research Heading link
Tools
NLP Tools for Social Sciences (an aggregated resource page curated by Dr. Kristopher Kyle, University of Oregon and Dr. Scoff Crossley, Georgia State University).
Voyant – visualize word patterns in texts
Elan – Annotating audio-video recordings
NLTK: Natural Language Processing Toolkit and the free book-length tutorial
R free software for statistical analysis; commonly used in textual analysis
Otranscribe – web-based manual transcription of speech data with built in automatic looper
Otter.Ai – Machine transcription of audio and video recordings, this is the tool behind Zoom’s automatic caption service
Audacity – free software to edit sound files
Fonts, software and tools for linguistics
CLOX – an automated transcription tool developed by faculty at the University of Washington Sociolinguistics Laboratory
Online keyboard for IPA symbols
Studying Diversity of Languages of the World
WALS.info World Atlas of Language Structures Online
Ethnologue documents world’s diverse languages
Corpora
TalkBank. Database of talk in audio and video