This time we are pleased to feature Angelika Kiss (PhD Candidate). She has been working on semantics and pragmatics of biased questions in various languages, looking at the meaning of questions and the relation between form and meaning. If you are also interested in this area of study, you don't want to miss out on her interview!
What are you currently working on in the summer? Summer is the time when I'm submitting abstracts, but it is also a time to run experiments. I am working on a Cantonese production experiment on rhetorical wh-questions with a subject wh-phrase, which I co-author with an MA student in our department, Justin Leung, and Roger Yu-Hsiang Lo, a PhD candidate from UBC. We are also working on a similar study on Mandarin, but in this case, the wh-word is the object, not the subject (we've run this experiment with subject wh-words before). For both studies, we are looking at the question: are rhetorical questions produced differently from genuine questions? I've run a production experiment on the meaning and prosody of Russian declarative questions with Andrei Munteanu, who is also a UofT PhD candidate, and a perception experiment on Hungarian declarative questions with Ádám Szalontai from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Last but not least, I am part of a project on the semantics and pragmatics of the Italian discourse connective ma 'but' with my supervisor, Michela Ippolito and Will Williams (PhD student at UofT), this is something that is related to but not part of my thesis.
I also have a side project that is dear to my heart, which is a psycholinguistic study involving silent gestures. It is related to word order (which was the topic of my second GP). And of course, I am also teaching LIN241 (Introduction to Semantics).
What do you think about teaching at UofT under the online environment?
Since I teach LIN241 asynchronously, I don't really get to see my students and their reactions, however, I think it goes well. It takes a lot of time to record and prepare the class material, it keeps me busy and I barely have a single moment of free time but I still enjoy it. As a semanticist, it is good to teach something that I am actually interested in!
How do you deliver content to your students? Would that be different if it is in person?
I record myself in advance, I think this is more accessible for students that are located around the world, it would be harsh to make them wake up in the middle of the night or really early in the morning. I also set up discussion boards and office hours for my students, but they don't really use it/come. I expected more and thought it would be easier for students to get involved, but it is understandable too, because they might be shy to come and some of them are working in the summer, so it is not as easy as I thought it would be.
I think an in-person class would probably be different. Seeing someone's face on a prerecorded video may not be enough to create the right atmosphere and does not necessarily make one approachable for them. I hope when it is in person, I could make students engage more in class.
Do you see any trend in your students?
I can tell which students care about semantics based on their assignments and quizzes. I can tell who cared to do the readings by the questions they approach me with (some even ask for additional materials on a certain topic). It is really encouraging to see that because it shows that at least some of them can and are willing to do the work successfully. As for those who are not doing too well in class, I am not sure if it is the difficulty of the course or they are just too busy to put effort into this class to do well.
What attracted you to the UofT Linguistics Department?
When I was applying for grad school, I was going to work on syntax (even though I switched to semantics now) and I knew that the UofT Linguistics Department is strong in syntax, that is why I came here. Also, I love that we can start the PhD program with a blank slate here in Canada, not necessarily knowing our thesis topic. This allowed me to explore other areas of linguistics.
What makes your experience in UofT different from the past?
I am originally from Hungary and I found that PhD programs in North America are so different from the ones in Europe. In Europe, universities would tell what grad students can work on, so those programs are mostly thematic. The PhD supervisors will tell you the topic. But at universities in Canada, students do not necessarily have to know what exactly they want to work on when they apply, it is so different from European universities. On the other hand, I think that courses here are way more intense than what I did before in Hungary (MA in theoretical linguistics) or in the Netherlands (MA in Chinese linguistics), however, it is a good kind of challenge. Students in Europe are left alone (e.g. reading the textbook or essay and write a paper on it), while in Canada, it is more hands-on and may involve fieldwork. I like the involvement we got here, like having to present several times in the same class and doing assignments during the term.
You have released a few papers in the past, what did you gain from writing them?
Writing these papers was useful in the development of my thoughts and projects, so I'm grateful that they are out, regardless of their actual quality or weight on the market.
After COVID, what do you want to accomplish or hope to do?
There is nothing specific that I want to accomplish but I hope to visit home when things are back to normal. I am also hoping to do in-person experiments! I could not continue to do any due to COVID. For example, I'd really like to do an eye-tracking study using the visual world paradigm to work on questions, common ground and word order.
We would like to say thank you to Angelika for taking her time in this busy summer for our interview! It is our pleasure to hear a lot about her ongoing experiments and studies. To learn more about her and her work, please check her website.
