2nd year graduate student Alessa Farinella has been awarded a Junior Fellowship in the Collaborative Research Centre “Prominence in Language” (CRC 1252, Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB 1252) funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation). The “Prominence in Language” group includes more than 60 researchers collaborating on 20 different scientific projects investigating how prominence structures language with respect to prosody, morphosyntax and semantics, and text and discourse structure.

This summer, Farinella will be at the University of Cologne working within the research group focusing on prosodic prominence across the world’s languages, and her host will be Prof. Dr. Nikolaus P. Himmelmann. Farinella will be working on an individual project she proposed that investigates prosodic prominence in varieties of Indonesian through the alignment of manual gesture to speech. The project builds on Farinella’s previous work with her undergraduate research supervisor Daniel Kaufman (Queen’s College, CUNY, Endangered Language Alliance). You can get a glimpse of that work by watching the video recording of Kaufman and Farinella’s presentation at the 28th annual meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA 28) from May 2021! Congratulations Alessa!