Dustin Chacón - Summer Research in Bangladesh and India

Dustin Chacón (3rd year IGERT student from the Linguistics Department) spent summer 2013 doing research in Dhaka, Bangladesh and Kolkata, India. He worked with Professor Sikder Monoare Murshed and Mashrur Imtiaz at Dhaka University, and with Professor Mina Dan and Shirsho Dasgupta at Calcutta University. Dustin was running a series of experiments investigating how filler-gap dependencies are resolved in Bengali/Bangla, an Indo-Aryan language with more than 200 million speakers. Dustin was investigating the role that word order plays in resolving ambiguous filler-gap dependencies in Bangla, since Bangla has a flexible word order in the relevant respects. He was also investigating dialectal differences between West Bengali Bangla and Bangladeshi Bangla, since pilot data suggested filler-gap dependency resolution preferences varied by dialect.