A brief Q&A with Dr. Lori Levin, a Research Professor of the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She has a B.A. in Linguistics (UPenn) and a Ph.D in Linguistics (MIT). She does work in machine translation and language technologies for low-resource languages. In 2006, Professor Levin was one of the founders of the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad, and she has been actively involved in it and the International Linguistics Olympiad US teams ever since.
1. What languages do you speak/have studied/are studying?
I only speak English fluently. The only languages I have studied in a class are French, Japanese, and Hebrew. If I am motivated by shopping in a foreign country, I will speak broken sentences in French, Spanish, Italian, or Japanese. However, I have supervised funded research on many languages. In the last year I have worked on Amharic and Uyghur.
2. Why do you think learning about languages/linguistics is important?
This is kind of obvious, but languages are important for communicating with people. If you speak more languages you can communicate with more people. Speaking languages also can help you get jobs in teaching, business, or government. Linguistics is important for metalinguistic awareness -- knowing that bits of meaning and grammar can be assembled in ways that are different from the languages you speak. 3. Could you describe any personal experience where language/linguistics had made an impact somehow?
Even though I'm not fluent in any other language, knowing linguistics helps me pick up phrases very quickly while traveling in other countries. And of course, I use linguistics every day in my job. 4. What is one interesting topic/subfield/language you'd recommend linguistics/language lovers to look at, and why? A few years ago I started to look at conlanging (making up languages). I don't paint or compose music, and although I consume a lot of fiction, I've never had an idea for writing a novel or a movie. But I realized that conlanging is an art form I can do, and I have a lot of ideas for conlangs. I started teaching conlanging four years ago (with my colleague, Alan Black). It is a good way to learn about linguistics. Our class focuses on decomposing language down into little pieces of meaning and little pieces of grammar and then putting them back together in a new way. Each student writes a reference grammar for their conlang and since we are in a language technologies department, our students also build talking clocks, chat bots, and morphological analyzers in their conlangs. For linguistic theory, my advice is to learn more than one linguistic theory. In fact, learn as many theories as you can and even learn the ones you don't like. If you only know one theory, you might confuse the theory with the facts. Another theory helps you see that you can look at the data another way. I'm currently a fan of Construction Grammar from the perspective of both generative and cognitive grammar.
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