Applications are now being accepted for the 2021 Spark Award For Undergraduate Research in Linguistics! Thanks to a generous endowment created by Michael H. and Nancy E. Scarbrough, the Department of Linguistics is able to offer funding to support undergraduate research projects. The maximum budget is $1000. Applications for the Spark Award for Undergraduate Research can be completed by filling out the following form: 2021%20Undergraduate%20Research%20Awards%20-%20Call%20for%20Applications.pdf and emailing it to linguistics@uga.edu. The application deadline is February 1, 2021.
Past winners of the Spark Award include James West, the 2020 recipient of the Spark Award for Undergraduate Research has used this award to work on his research project "A Lexical-Functional Grammar for the Irish Language" and will present some of his findings on January 29 as part of the weekly Spring Colloquium.
"This project presents a lexical-functional analysis of the Irish autonomous verb and an accompanying computer grammar capable of syntactically parsing Irish sentences using the Xerox Linguistic Environment. The distribution of the grammar and its vocabulary was pulled from literature on the Irish autonomous verb and relevant sentences from the Irish Universal Dependencies Treebank. The Spark award enabled me to spend the summer working remotely with Dr. John Hale on this project, and it's thanks to the Scarbroughs that the work was made possible."--James West