Masha chosen for Mercator Fellowship

Supporting research in Germany on silence and noise.

Congratulations to Professor Emerita Masha Polinsky, whom the German Research Foundation (DFG) has chosen to be a Mercator Fellow. The fellowship program "enables an intensive and long-term exchange with scientists abroad, whose expertise is of particular importance for the research goals" of a specific Collaborative Research Centre. In this case the Research Centre has the title Silence, Signal and Noise in Language, or SiNoSi for short, and its goal is "to investigate role of silence and noise in our capacity for perceiving, learning and producing linguistic signals," in light of the view that our "effortless ability to make sense of silence (lack of overt form) and noise (spurious forms and rule violations) is quite remote from an idealized notion of form-meaning pairings." Joining Masha on the team of Fellows are Charles Yang (Penn), Petra Wagner (Bielefeld), and Rich Shivener (York). The several Fellows "are funded to be temporarily on site to promote the progress of CRC projects particularly intense by face-to-face collaboration."