The USP welcomes Professor Mary Dalrymple, from the University of Oxford, as the Ngee Ann Kongsi Visiting Professor for Semester 2, AY2014/2015. Having worked both in industrial research and in academia, Prof Dalrymple brings with her a wealth of experience that she will be sharing in her USP class UQR2212: How Linguists Work.  I had the privilege of meeting her and her husband at the airport when they arrived from London on the first day of 2015. After she had settled in to our residential college — Cinnamon College (USP) — I sat down with her for a chat. 

Prof Dalrymple is no stranger to the USP. She has visited us in 2012 and given a talk on her work in Indonesia, where she produced a grammar of Dusner, a highly-endangered Indonesian language with just three speakers left in the world when she began work on it.

Having stayed briefly in our residential college back then, she told me that she looks forward to spending a whole semester in UTown living amidst the students.

When asked why she chose to come to Singapore for a semester, it turned out that Prof Dalrymple has always had an interest in the linguistics of Asian languages and Singapore is an excellent starting point in that field.

It also helped that her husband, Prof Ken Kahn, also has research interests and a collaboration with the USP’s Deputy Director for Residential Life, A/P Martin Henz (Prof Kahn will also be teaching a course this semester at the USP -- UIT2207: Computational Thinking and Modelling).

While this is her first time teaching in Singapore, Prof Dalrymple is no stranger to Asia either: she spent 5 years teaching English in Nepal and Japan after her undergraduate studies before returning to school for a Masters in linguistics to develop her skills further. It was during graduate school however, that she discovered how much she enjoyed linguistics research and that eventually led to a PhD at Stanford University, followed by a long career in the field.

I was curious about Prof Dalrymple’s work at Xerox PARC, the research facility in Palo Alto that has given us the laser printer, the graphical user interface (without which, we would still be typing commands into computers!), the computer mouse and even the WYSIWYG text editor (imagine writing your term papers like how you might code a HTML page by hand), since linguistics seems like such a theoretical field that might not have much application in real life.

Prof Dalrymple explained that she worked on computational linguistics while there, with her theoretical work on grammars helping to inform computer scientists seeking to develop ways for machines to understand and process human language. Research along these lines would be what powers technology such as Siri and other voice control agents, or smart search engines like Bing!

We then talked about the new module — How Linguists Work — she will be teaching beginning 13 Jan. Pedagogically, I found the module to be interesting, particularly that it contains an option after the Recess Week for students to pick a strand — either computational or empirical — to work on.

Group projects would then involve collaborative work between students of both strands , which will take the integrative multidisciplinary approach here in the USP to another level.

To Prof Dalrymple, this is a deliberate arrangement as she felt it was important to bring different perspectives into the research process and she hoped students in her class can experience this firsthand.

Finally, in the age-old debate about the divide between the arts and the science, I asked Prof Dalrymple about where linguistics should be placed on the spectrum of knowledge, since her class is interestingly coded as a USP Science module while other linguistics classes in NUS are offered under the Arts and Social Sciences.

In her view, linguistics is truly something that can span the divide, from the sociolinguistics (which often tends to the literary side of things) to the computational and technical nature of syntax and other scientific areas of the discipline. She added that language is a uniquely human phenomenon and the study of language therefore run the full gamut as a result of how crucial language is to being human.

She thus hopes that students will leave her class with “a sense of diversity of languages” and to be able to, in the process, “lose the idea of prescriptive ideals” (more details about that if you take the class!). Ultimately, she hopes that students will acquire the ability to apply logical thinking skills to the analysis of linguistic phenomena that are ever-present in daily life.