The MSU Linguistic Student Organization (LSO) had its bi-annual Graduate Linguistics Expo at Michigan State (GLEAMS) on Friday, October 28, and Saturday, October 29, in Wells Hall. 

GLEAMS is a departmental colloquium for graduate students in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Culture. It provides MSU graduate students with an opportunity to showcase their work in phonology, syntax, semantics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and child language acquisition, allowing graduate students to gain experience presenting their research, answer questions about their work, as well as receive feedback from colleagues within and outside the department.   

This year’s GLEAMS also featured two keynote speakers, Dr. Daniel Goodhue from Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (https://www.leibniz-zas.de/en/) in Berlin, Germany and Dr. Nick Danis from Washington University in St. Louis (https://linguistics.wustl.edu/). Dr. Daniel Goodhue presented “Biased questions and speech acts: Grammar and pragmatics” and Dr. Nick Danis presented “Comparing phonological representations”. 

Yongqing Ye, chair of the GLEAMS 2022 organizing committee and president of LSO, said, “Our goal with organizing GLEAMS is to provide a platform for grad students to present their own research, but GLEAMS also provides visibility for the MSU Linguistics program. This is part of the reason why we invite speakers. It gives MSU students the opportunity to engage with researchers from different institutions, while also boosting the visibility of the program we have here at MSU.” 

During the conference, each student was given 15 minutes to present their work followed by a 15-minute open question-and-answer session. Shannon Cousins, member of the GLEAMS 2022 organizing committee and chair of the LSO Alumni Committee, said, “The best part of GLEAMS this year has definitely been the turnout. A lot of our new graduate students are here and are actively involved and asking questions. We’ve had a lot of fun linguistic conversations take place throughout the conference and that’s been great to see.” 

10 students from the Department of Linguistics, Language, and Culture presented their research as part of the 2022 GLEAMS: 

• Yaxuan Wang, “An analysis of Khalkha Mongolian possessive markers” 
• John Ryan, “Telicity in English: Behavioral Data of Event Interpretations” 
• Jingying Xu, “Telicity in Mandarin Preschoolers”  

• Jason Smith, “Extraction is Relative: Relative Clauses in Mende”  
• Yunting Gu, “The Semantics of Mandarin Hai” 
• Philips Pellino, “An introduction to the syntax and semantics of Contrarian hardly” 
• Jack Rechsteiner, “Sociophonetic variation and imitation in nonbinary speakers” 
• Shannon Cousins, “Aspectual Verbs Acceptability: Theoretical Predictions and Offline Judgments” 

• Jiasheng Guo, “Cue-based Memory Retrieval in Sentence Processing: Individual Differences in Cue Weighting” 
• Adam Barnhardt, “The early-adolescent indexical system amid rapid sound change: How are Northern Cities Shift and Low-Back Merger Shift vowel realizations employed in acts of stance-talking?” 

Adam Barnhardt, a student who presented their work at GLEAMS 2022, said, “By participating in GLEAMS, I was able to give a longer scale format presentation of research I’ve presented at previous conferences. That allowed me to think more deeply about the ideas in my current research and to get other people’s opinions on it, both inside and outside of MSU’s linguistics department, which was very useful.” 

For more information and summaries of the talks, visit the LSO website (https://msulinguists.weebly.com/gleams-2022-325625.html).