Applications are now open for the University’s 2024 UNIQ+ postgraduate research internships.

UNIQ+ research internships are designed to provide students from under-represented and disadvantaged backgrounds who are ordinarily resident in the UK with the opportunity to experience postgraduate study.

UNIQ+ gives students the chance to experience life as a graduate research student at Oxford, gaining skills and experience that we hope will enhance both their CV and any future postgraduate applications. During the seven-week programme, which will run from Monday 1 July to Friday 16 August 2024, students will undertake a research project, attend training and information sessions, and have the opportunity to take part in social events. The programme offers a stipend of £3,000, as well as free-of-charge accommodation. UNIQ+ is an opportunity to improve your research skills and find out more about postgraduate study and careers.

Applications close at 12:00 midday UK time on Wednesday 21 February 2024. For full eligibility criteria, the full list of projects available, and to apply, visit: https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/access/uniq-plus/about

Dr Jose Elias-Ulloa is running two Linguistics Language projects in 2024:

Linguistics 01: The prosody of corrective BUT-sentences in English and Spanish (co-organised with Dr Danfeng Wu)

This project studies the syntax-prosody interface. In ‘Mary walks her dog [every morning]’, ‘every morning’ is a syntactic constituent and, normally we don’t put a pause before it. But when fronted, as in ‘Every morning, Mary walks her dog’, a pause can appear after ‘every morning’. Prosody refers to the rhythm and intonation of sentences and varies to reflect changes in the order of syntactic constituents. This project investigates how much prosody and syntax diverge in two types of Corrective BUT-Sentences:

• when negation occurs preceding the verb (e.g. Mary did not hug Paul, but John)
• when negation appears after the verb (e.g. Mary hugged not Paul but John).

We will compare English and Spanish by identifying and analysing prosodic and acoustic cues at the prosodic boundary before BUT in both languages so we can uncover the principles behind the similarities and differences that we observe between these languages.

Linguistics 02: Coarticulatory processes in Shipibo: A phonetic investigation of an Amazonian language

Phonetics involves a comprehensive analysis of linguistic sounds: their articulation, perception, and acoustic characteristics. An integral component of sound articulation is coarticulation, where articulatory movements overlap continuously. For instance, take the English word 'pin.' When we pronounce the /p/ sound, a burst of air is released immediately after the lips part. This aspiration blends with the onset of the following vowel, causing partial devoicing. While producing the vowel, air simultaneously escapes through the nose in anticipation of the final nasal consonant, imparting a distinct nasal quality.

This project delves into the main coarticulatory processes of Shipibo, an Amazonian language spoken in South America. Our approach revolves around acoustic analyses. Utilising the program for phonetic analysis, Praat, we aim to examine spectrograms and identify the acoustic cues associated with various coarticulatory processes, such as vowel nasalisation and glottalization as well as consonant velarisation, labialisation, and (de)voicing.