Undergraduate Research Project Mentorship

In Winter 2025, I supervised an independent study project by Fiona Smith. She investigated the sequencing of imperfective and perfective aspect in a corpus of oral literature in Tlingit, comparing different speakers’ literary styles. I taught her in detail about the structure of Tlingit verbs and sentences. I also assigned readings and literature review tasks to allow her to gain a multifaceted understanding of imperfectivity. I met with her weekly to provide feedback and advice, and I graded her final paper at the end of the semester.

Involving Undergraduates in Research

Since Winter 2026, I have been supervising six undergraduate research assistants in four projects surrounding the creation and mobilization of digital Tlingit data.

• Fiona Smith is developing a set of robust part-of-speech tagging guidelines for a Tlingit corpus, designed to be usable by non-experts in Tlingit. I hold biweekly meetings with her to discuss refinements to the guidelines.

• Jasmine Cloutier-Fournier and Lydia Lepki are applying the part-of-speech tagging guidelines to tag a Tlingit corpus. Over the course of a semester, I have trained them in Tlingit sentence structure and key morphological patterns. I have also developed a workflow for them to verify each other’s work. I distill any mistakes into suggestions to improve the guidelines.

• Mona Liu is developing a Tlingit verb lemmatizing program. I have taught her the patterns of Tlingit verbs’ morphological and phonological structure and I regularly evaluate her work.

• Inaya Abbasi and Charlotte Pieper are annotating audio files from fieldwork using the software ELAN. For this task, I taught them to use ELAN, and I regularly give them explanations of the linguistic purpose of each fieldwork session they annotate.

In Winter 2024, I served as a supervisor for the McGill Linguistics Department Program for Undergraduate Research in Linguistics (PURL). I proposed a research project and selected applicants Phoenix Gee-Benwell and Alex Ito. I met with them weekly. I also assigned weekly reading and note-taking assignments designed to teach them about the theory of pluractionality and aspect and about Tlingit morphology. They then completed a corpus-tagging task related to pluractionality. I also graded their interim reports and final reports for the program. I later wrote a letter in support of Ms. Gee-Benwell’s application to graduate school.