Prize Winners Recognized at 2023 Linguistics Lunch for Graduating Seniors

The annual Department of Linguistics lunch for graduating seniors on June 7, 2023 provided a chance to award the departmental prizes for graduating seniors. This year's winners were Gabriel Gilbert '23 who won the Academic Achievement Award in Linguistics for his senior honors thesis on "Directionals in Spoken Hawaiian: A Corpus Analysis," and Sarah Karnes '23 who won the Academic Achievement Award in Computational Linguistics for her senior honors thesis titled, "Automatic Parsing of Polynesian Languages: A Case Study in Cook Islands Māori." Gabriel Gilbert was advised by Prof. David Peterson and plans to pursue a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Chicago after graduation. Sarah Karnes is a Computational Linguistics Major who was advised by Prof. Rolando Coto Solano. She has plans to work as a software development engineer at Amazon after graduation.

There was an unusally large class of graduating majors and modified majors (18 total) and minors (11 total) this year. In addition to the two students recognized by the awards listed above, there were two other graduating seniors who completed honors theses this year. Abigail Schaefer '23 completed a thesis titled "The Low-Back Merger Vowel Shift and Other Features of Southern New Hampshire English," and George Stain '23 completed a thesis titled "Bl[æ]ck [ɔ]lbany: A Sociolinguistic study of African American English in Albany, NY." Both students were advised by Prof. Jim Stanford.