Individualized Learning Stories
Linguistic Scholars
Thomas Matusiak ’13 and Professor Kuo-Ming Sung
Thomas Matusiak ’13, is combing syntax and semantics in a summer research project he hopes will shed new light on the Amdo Tibetan language.
Matusiak and Kuo-Ming Sung, associate professor of Chinese and linguistics, are analyzing evidential marking in Amdo Tibetan. “Evidentiality is a system in the grammar through which you obligatorily express evidence or give the source of information for what you’re saying,” said Matusiak. “For example, to say ‘John left the house’ in Tibetan, there must be some sort of marker to indicate whether you saw it yourself, heard it from another person, or whether your inferred it.”
Traditionally, Sung said, analyses of evidential marking in the Tibetan language were based on semantics. The pair believes that by dissecting the syntactic construction of sentences, they can help clarify how Tibetan speakers express their perspectives.
The research project follows a tutorial on Tibetan that Matusiak did with Sung last fall. “I had no idea about linguistics before I came to Lawrence,” Matusiak said. “I wanted to be an English major. I took Introduction to Linguistics and was really intrigued by it, so I took a few more linguistics classes.
“I became interested in this project because I wanted to take the analytical tools I acquired in my classes and apply them in original research,” Matusiak added. “In classes we analyze only a selection of crucial data in order to learn a key point, but this research gives me the opportunity to decide what data is necessary and to acquire it and analyze it myself. By doing that, I’m experiencing as close as possible real linguistic work.”
A grant from Lawrence’s Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program is funding Matusiak’s efforts. In addition, Sung has contacts with colleagues in Amdo to help Matusiak in his information gathering. “I wanted to provide Thomas with a realistic experience of what fieldwork in linguistics is all about,” Sung said. “This way, he has access to Tibetan people, thus giving him a virtual fieldwork experience.”
For Sung, who frequently travels to China to do linguistics research, having the chance to partner with Matusiak has been rewarding. “In China you work on your own,” Sung said. “Here, I have someone trained in linguistics to talk to and to brainstorm with. Doing research on your own, there’s no one to share ideas with, it’s a lonely experience. And to study something you have a passion for, with someone who shares this passion is gold!”
By summer’s end, Matusiak and Sung plan to co-author a paper that will reveal their findings to the broader linguistics community. “To be published in a paper, as a rising junior at an undergraduate college, is amazing,” Matusiak said. “I’m thrilled that I’ll have this opportunity. And because the research questions the majority of what is already written, I hope it will receive attention.”
Matusiak added that he plans to continue pursuing his research, eventually developing it into a Senior Experience project.
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