Dr. Samantha Rarrick has received a Postdoctoral Fellowship with the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences. Through this two-year fellowship, Sam will work to document and describe Sinasina Sign Language, a previously unreported sign language which she encountered during her dissertation fieldwork. This sign language is one of the first indigenous sign languages to be reported in Papua New Guinea and its documentation and description has potential to drastically contribute to the typology of sign languages in this region.
Find more about Sam’s project here.
Congratulations, Dr. Rarrick!
Pre-defense dissertations are submitted to our department two weeks prior to each defense. Upcoming dissertations for Spring 2017 include:
We will be adding to this list as the semester continues. You can also check the Dissertations page for updates on other pre-defense dissertations for the current semester, or final dissertations from previous semesters.
Linguistics student Samantha Rarrick and independent scholar Brittany Wilson have just published an article description the Sign Language Documentation Training Center (SLDTC), a joint effort of Kapi‘olani Community College students and faculty, and graduate students in the Department of Linguistics. Founded in 2013, SLDTC expands on the successful model of the Language Documentation Training Center to document signed language use in Hawai‘i, including American Sign Language and the critically endangered Hawai‘i Sign Language (ISO 639-3: hps).