Teaching

      COURSES I TEACH:

      LING-212, Structure of Human Language: Morphology and Syntax (syllabus)

      LING-214, Meaning in Human Language: Semantics and Pragmatics (syllabus)

      LING-190/285, Language & Race in Atlanta (syllabus)

      LING-242/ANT-285, Languages of the World (syllabus)

      LING-190/498, Language & Linguistics in Sci-Fi (syllabus)

      LING-485, Negation in Human Language (syllabus)

      LING-485, Field Methods in Linguistics

      LING-401, Language, Mind and Society (capstone seminar)

      LING-201/ANT-203, Foundations of Linguistics


      SOME MATERIALS:    (feel free to use; please send feedback)

      Language & Linguistics in Sci-Fi (ScholarBlog)
      A website about the class, intended for instructors and students. Includes logistical info about how I teach the class, background research about how other people have taught related classes, and a short essay about each of the assigned readings.

      Video tutorials on the IPA (Consonants and Vowels)
      Intro to IPA principles; transcription practice; vowel features. Note: Vowels and consonants in the examples are those used in my variety of U.S. English.

      Video tutorials on formal semantics
      ~10-minute intros to propositional logic, truth tables, predicate logic, quantifiers, type theory. These are intended to serve as a bridge between classes; students get more in-depth instruction and practice in class.

      What I want you to get out of your Linguistics major
      This was a speech I gave at the 2022 Emory Linguistics Awards Banquet. It will give you a good sense of my teaching and learning values.

      Focusing on evidence in intro linguistics classes (slides and sample exercise)
      Presented at the 2020 LSA Annual Meeting as part of the Symposium on Teaching Large General Linguistics Classes. Includes sample assignments and prompts I use to get students thinking about evidence, argumentation and other 'bigger-picture' questions in introductory linguistics classes.

      A fieldwork exercise for teaching undergraduate syntax (assignment and description)
      Presented at SECOL, 2013. This exercise gives students some hands-on experience applying field methods. Students meet in small groups with a native speaker of Swahili and try to find out how relative clauses are formed. Can be adapted for various courses and levels.


    Research

      DISSERTATION:

      The postsyntactic derivation and its phonological reflexes       (University of Pennsylvania, 2008)
      I examine a set of phrasal phonological rules, which apply across words but not across the board,
      and develop a model in which these rules apply to cycles/phases at various points after spell-out.
      The proposal is illustrated with first-hand data from Huave, Luganda, and French. [download pdf]

      OTHER PAPERS & PRESENTATIONS:

      Suprasegmental phenomena in Distributed Morphology
      Draft, to appear in upcoming Handbook of Distributed Morphology,
      eds. A. Alexiadou, R. Kramer, A. Marantz, I. Oltra-Massuet. Cambridge. [paper]

      Logoori verb tones and the role of morphophonology
      Presented at the Princeton Phonology Forum, March 2021. [slides] [recording]

      Clause-final negation and the Jespersen cycle in Logoori
      Presented at LSA Annual Meeting, 2020, and LCUGA 6, 2019. [paper]

      Logoori grammatical tone: A Distributed Morphology analysis
      Presented at the Florida Linguistics Yearly Meeting, 2019. [paper]

      The acquisition of English article alternations: Variation, competition and the default
      2019. In Variable properties in language: Their nature and acquisition.
      Ed. David Lightfoot & Jon Havenhill. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. [pre-press version]

      Head-movement and allomorphy in children's negative questions
      Presented at the LSA Annual Meeting, 2018. [poster] | [paper]

      Propositional how questions and negation
      Presented at the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, April 2016. [poster] | [paper]

      How allomorphic is English article allomorphy?
      2016. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 1(1): 20. 1-27. [DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.62]

      Optimizing by accident: A/an allomorphy and glottal stop
      Presented at the LSA Annual Meeting, Jan. 2016. [poster] | [paper]

      How is contraction not possible here?
      Presented at the LSA Annual Meeting, Jan. 2015. [handout] | [poster] | [extended abstract]

      A/an and the: allomorphy or phonology?
      Presented at the LSA Annual Meeting (Jan. 2014), SECOL 81 (March 2014). [handout]

      Phonological evidence for the syntax of SVO and VOS in Huave
      In Proceedings of the Workshop on Sound Systems of Mexico and Central America, 2014. [paper]

      Pre-nominal a in San Mateo Huave
      Presented at the I Jornada de Estudios Huaves, UNAM, Mexico City, September 2010. [paper]

      A-movement locality and intervention effects in Luganda
      In Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 2008, pp. 361-369. [paper]

      Relative clauses without CPs in Luganda
      Presented at WECOL 2007, UC San Diego, 2007. [paper]

      Phrasal tone domains in San Mateo Huave (2007)
      In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. [paper] | [about huave]

      French phrasal phonology in a derivational model of PF
      (M. Pak and M. Friesner) In Proceedings of NELS 36, vol. 2, 2006, pp. 480-491. [paper] | [poster]

      Explaining branchingness effects in phrasal phonology
      In Proceedings of the 24th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 2005, pp. 308-316. [paper]

      Infinitive marking with for: a diachronic account
      Presented at PLC 29. In Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 12.1, 2006, pp. 293-306. [paper]
    Voting

      Please contact me if you have any questions about voting!

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      2. CHECK/CONFIRM YOUR REGISTRATION
      3. GET READY FOR THE NEXT ELECTION
      Voting resources (all non-partisan)
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        Work to help others participate. Volunteer for Emory Votes or another organization you believe in. VoteRiders does amazing work; you can text-bank or write letters for them from anywhere.

        Engage in nonviolent protest. It's good and necessary work, no matter who says otherwise.


    Contact

      OFFICE: Modern Languages 207
      PHONE: 404-727-8077
      EMAIL: mgpak at emory dot edu
      ADDRESS: Emory Linguistics, 532 Kilgo Circle Ste. 202C, Atlanta, GA 30322






Last updated June 19, 2024