By Carl Polley
Graduate Degree Fellow, Linguistics (PhD)

I would like to thank the East-West Center Alumni for their generous Summer Travel Award, which I used to travel and present at two conferences in August. This was my first time attending international linguistics conferences outside of the United States.

At the 18th International Congress of Linguistics (CIL18), in Seoul, Korea, I presented a paper on theoretical syntax titled “Unaccusativity and Unergativity in Mandarin Stative Verbs: Argument Structure Under Resultative Serial Verb $P-Conjunction.” CIL is one of the largest conferences worldwide for linguistics, and I had an opportunity to meet scholars in many fields of linguistics, several of whom I’ve continued to keep in touch with regarding my dissertation plans and research. My presentation was well received, and I am now preparing the paper for publication. The photo above is of me at CIL18 with Dr. Hyun-Sook Ko, an alumni of the University of Hawaii and now Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Seoul National University.

At the other conference, The 6th International Conference on Cognitive Science (ICCS 2008), I presented an experimental eye-tracking study, “Tracking Glances to Simulated Distracters During Language Comprehension.” ICCS 2008 is held every two years and brings together researchers from linguistics, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and computer science. Presenting my study before a wider audience forced me to think through several of the problems that I had encountered in my experiments, and I drew insights on how the experiments can be improved in my further research this year. While at ICCS 2008, I also met several senior researchers who invited me to visit their labs.

This conference trip was a valuable change for me to develop as a professional scholar while still a student. Thank you again for giving me this opportunity!

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