SSHRC Success

Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins is the Linguistics co-investigator on a multi-disciplinary SSHRC Insight Grant, involving team members from French (Claire Carlin, Principal Investigator), English (Janelle Jenstad and Elizabeth Grove-White), the UVic Libraries (Lisa Godard, Corey Davis and John Durno), and the Humanities Computing and Media Centre (Stewart Arneil, Martin Holmes and Greg Newton). Through four different case studies, one of which is the Nxaʔamxcín Database and Dictionary project in Linguistics, the grant addresses how to conclude and archive projects in Digital Humanities so as to maintain their dynamic features and ensure their long term usability. 

Alexandra D’Arcy is the recipient of a SSHRC Insight Grant to investigate how linguistic change advances across successive generations of speakers. Past research has engaged in post-hoc theorizing about the continuous advancement of change but it has never addressed it directly. This longitudinal project zeroes in on the period when children begin to participate by shifting their language model along an apparently pre-set direction of change; a cohort will be followed over five years to observe the onset and early progression of change with the aim of tracking the diachronic evolution of specific linguistic features.

Li-Shih Huang is co-applicant and co-organizer of a SSHRC-funded event--Mapping the Landscape: Colloquium on Language in Canadian Univerity--hosted and sponsored by SFU, UBC, UVic, U of T, and U of Waterloo. The event, which took place in May 2017 and featured six invited international speakers and over 30 invited talks, was a huge success!  Dr. Huang is also the Principle Investigator on a multi-year SSHRC Insight Grant project. Her project aims to address the pressing issues related to current refugee resettlement efforts faced by multiple stakeholders (e.g., federal agencies, researchers, LINC providers, instructors, learners, material and program developers) by informing, providing, and assisting the crucial work of culturally sensitive language training critical to facilitating the refugees' integration into Canadian society and the workforce.