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Williams Students Recognized for Linguistics Work - December 11, 2007
WILLIAMSTOWN - Williams College senior Jeremy Doernberger of Woodbridge, Conn., and Jacob Cerny, a junior from North Miami Beach, Fla., were recognized for their outstanding sociolinguistic research at the New Ways of Analyzing Variation Conference this year in Philadelphia.
From among a field of 26 student projects, most presented by graduate students, Doernberger's and Cerny's presentation tied for first for Best Student Poster. The two students will split a modest cash award, and a written version of their paper will be included in the Penn Working Papers in Linguistics.
The poster, titled "The Low Back Merger in Miami," investigated the spread of a dialect into South Florida over the past 10 years.
"The low back merger is a dialect feature that is widespread across most of the 'non-Southern' United States," said Doernberger, "and it means that someone with the merger pronounces the vowels in the words 'caught' and 'cot' as the same vowel."
Conducting field research in southern Florida in March and August 2007, the two students concluded that, in contrast to the last major study of the low back merger, which argued that Florida was still in transition, 10 years later, Floridian speakers now demonstrate a full merger. Doernberger and Cerny arrived at these results after an exhaustive acoustic analysis of their recorded interviews.
The students' research into the dialect began as a term paper for visiting professor Tara Sanchez's course, "Dialects of North American English," in spring 2006. After Doernberger's and Cerny's abstract was accepted by conference officials over the summer, the students collected additional data and sharpened their analysis under the guidance of assistant professor of linguistics Nathan Sanders.
Doernberger, a contract major in linguistics, is writing an honors thesis about dialectology.
"It's difficult to say how many dialects there are in the United States, because 'dialect' could mean several different things," said Doernberger. "[Yet], there are five major dialect regions in the U.S., but the actual number of dialects is in the dozens, if not over 100."
When not analyzing the way words are produced, Doernberger has been a member of the Williams swim team and captain of the men's water polo team. He also is head tour guide at the admission office.
Cerny is also pursuing a contract major in linguistics at Williams. While linguistics is his major, Cerny says he is an unofficial member of the math department at Williams. Outside of the classroom, he has served in leadership positions on both the freshman and sophomore councils. |
I am truly proud of Jacob Cerny.
I watched him develop into a great student.
What an honor for him to be recognized. | | from: JayChernoff | on: 12-17-2007 |
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