The Department of Chemistry at the University of Kentucky organizes an annual Symposium on Chemistry and Molecular Biology.  This Symposium was established in honor of Anna S. Naff, a University of Kentucky graduate, through the generous support of Dr. Benton Naff of NIH. The Symposium has an interdisciplinary character and is attended by students and faculty from Chemistry, Biochemistry, Biology, Pharmacy, Engineering, Agriculture and Medicine. The Symposium features renowned experts from around the world, including Nobel prize-winning scientists and is attended by faculty and students from colleges and universities in Kentucky and the contiguous States.

The Symposium will be held in the William T. Young Library on the University of Kentucky campus. A poster session will be held in conjunction with the Symposium.

EVENT SCHEDULE

12:00-12:25:  Gihyun Gal   (faculty mentor: Greg Stump).

12:25- 12:50:  Aaron Mueller   (faculty mentor: Mark Lauersdorf).

1:00-1:50: Corey Meeks   (faculty mentor: Jennifer Cramer).

ABSTRACTS

Gihyun Gal

Comblending in Korean neologisms with borrowing English words

This research focuses on an interesting type of word formation process in Korean that involves the combination of different morphological processes, namely compounding, blending, abbreviation and acronym. As previously shown, both of these processes are both very productive in Korean (Jung 1992, Seo 2013, Lee 2014). 'Comblending', a term I coined to describe this new process, draws from the above-mentioned processes and seem to be on the rise on the World Wide Web and on social media like Instagram. However, although they might be argued to arise from those sources, these new forms get integrated in current speech rather than just being used on the previously mentioned platforms. More importantly, in many of those neologisms also involve borrowings from English and include an agent-like word 족[dʒok], which means 'person or group of people'.

(1) Grup dʒok 'elders who keep on living like students' > grown-ups + dʒok

(2) BMW dʒok 'Office workers using public transport' > Bus Metro Walking + dʒok

(3) Naports dʒok 'People who enjoys sports after work' > 'night' [naɪt] + sports + dʒok

(4) Eomma cri 'interrupted PC user, usually by his/her mother' > Eomma ‘mother’+crisis

(5) Chilaryman 'person who still live with his parents' > child + salaryman

Such data raise questions relating to (1) the internal structure of these new complex words (2) the order of which the different processes come into play (3) the type of analysis that would appropriately describe this peculiar process and (4) whether we have instances of phonological overlapping or not. I will here examine these newly coined words from an argue that given the derived meanings, a purely morphological approach seem favorable. When the Korean neologisms are formed by either compound process or blend process, some sub-processes would be happened such as acronym or abbreviation before the neologisms are coined completely through compound or blend processes by Korean speakers on the World Wide Web or on social media. Because those two processes would be a sort of important process in order to form of the Korean neologisms productively. Through the neologisms, it is possibly to glance some tendencies of current Korean social situations. Because most of Korean neologisms mirror of thoughts of Korean aspect such as lifestyle, a desire of education, social economy situation and characters of people.

Aaron Mueller

Lexical and Semantic Shift in the Linguistic Construction of Social Gender: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Written U.S. English

This study aims to track shifts in linguistic constructions of gender in written U.S. discourse using the Corpus of Historical American English (1810-2009). Lexical values were examined by dividing selected gender words by gender and by word type (e.g. male pronouns, female titles); per-million occurrences were observed by decade and word-type category. Semantic values were compared by decade through calculating mutual information and t-scores for select collocations. Preliminary results indicate that male words appear more frequently than female words for almost every word-type category; non-binary gender words appeared too infrequently for analysis. Semantically, men are associated with appearance, wealth, and power, and intellectual pursuits; women, mainly with appearance. Appearance was the main semantic association for all genders, though women exhibited this to a greater extent than men. Mutual information and t-scores varied less than was expected; this could suggest that linguistic constructs of these genders have changed little despite perceived sociocultural progress.

Corey Meeks

Creative production and pedagogy: Teaching and learning through documentary creation

As students and teachers transition into the modern classroom, we must understand how to teach and learn in new ways. Educators may teach the way they are taught, yet there are many reasons that suggest we cannot continue to teach as we have for the past several hundred years. Dr. Cramer experimented with the idea of teaching through creating in a class on American English (LIN/ENG 310), and she facilitated the creation of a documentary that would showcase our knowledge about dialectal variation in the United States. Ultimately, the class produced a roughly 20-minute film on the dialects of Kentucky, a topic selected and cultivated by the students themselves. Several teams did everything from scripting to video production and editing with minimal control from the instructor. By playing their roles, they were given a better reason to understand and internalize the material covered in the course compared to hearing it in a lecture or reading it from a book. We hope teachers will continue to experiment with the idea of teaching through creating, as the Italian enlightenment thinker Vico Giambattista said, "To know is to put together the elements of things."

When more than one person talks simultaneously, overlaps happen. Overlapping talk is a ubiquitous phenomenon found in any speech exchange systems (cf., Schegloff, 2000). However, when it comes to the second language acquisition (SLA) research, overlapping talk has seldom been taken up as an object of investigation.

In this presentation, I will present my preliminary investigation of overlapping talk observed during pair work activities in elementary Japanese language classrooms at a U.S. university. The data come from a corpus of 67 video-recorded pair work cases. A conversation-analytic (CA) framework is used to closely examine the occurrences of overlapping talk on a turn-by-turn basis.

By drawing on the ‘unusual’ characteristics of overlapping talk found in the database, I will discuss whether or not these pair work activities afford opportunities for SLA.

Through this presentation, I would also like to discuss how CA, established by sociologists, such as Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, can be applied to the analysis of L2 interaction data in order to advance our understanding of the SLA process.