I am an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of British Columbia. Between 2009 and 2012, I was an assistant professor at the City University of New York. I held a joint appointment between the English department at the College of Staten Island and the Linguistics program at the Graduate Center. I graduated from the Linguistics department at The Ohio State University in August of 2009. My dissertation is titled A Probabilistic Model of Phonological Relationships from Contrast to Allophony. Please follow the links below to find out more about my research, teaching, and personal interests.
E-mail: kathleen.hall@ubc.ca
Department of Linguistics
Totem Field Studios, Rm. 125
University of British Columbia
2613 West Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4
Canada
My research focuses on answering questions in theoretical phonology using techniques from a wide variety of areas, including experimental phonetics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, semantics, and information theory.
The kinds of questions I am interested in are: * what discrete categories of sound do language users extract from a continuous acoustic signal? * what relationships may hold between these sound categories in a given language? * how are these relationships determined? * what patterns and processes apply to these categories? * what linguistic information do these categories convey? * how do language learners acquire these categories? * to what extent are these categories, relationships, and processes psychologically real? * what cognitive processes have led to these categories, relationships, and processes? * how can these categories, relationships, and processes be modelled in an objective and predictive way?
In the fall of 2016 (2016 Winter Term 1 at UBC), I am teaching the following classes:
Stat 203 – Statistical Methods – I am teaching the Linguistics / Speech Sciences tutorial section (T1D); the main course instructor is Bruce Dunham. The course website is www.slate.stat.ubc.ca
Ling 200 – Linguistic Theory & Analysis I
My office hours for this semester are: * 11:00 – 12:00 on Tuesdays, Room 5, Stores Rd. Annex * 12:00 – 1:00 on Wednesdays, Room 5, Stores Rd. Annex * 12:00 – 1:00 on Thursdays, Room 5, Stores Rd. Annex * By appointment in Totem Field Studios, Rm. 125
I am often happy to provide letters of reference for students, but please keep in mind the following pointers:
You should ask for a letter of reference only from someone who knows you reasonably well and can write excellent things about you. Letters are taken quite seriously by most programs, and even a “good” letter that simply replicates information that someone could learn from your transcript and CV (e.g., stating that you get good grades and have XYZ experience) is likely to do you a disservice rather than a service, as it will make it sound like there isn’t anything better to say.
Therefore, if you plan to ask me for a letter, you should make a point of making yourself personally known to me throughout the time you are in my course. Introduce yourself, come to office hours, send me e-mails, etc. Help me get to know you and see that you are a bright, talented, dedicated individual, so that I can convey that in a letter. (You should of course be doing this anyway if you want to be an excellent student!)
Personally, I require that I have had you in class for an entire semester (including the final exam / paper) before I will even consider writing a letter of reference for you. I prefer to have had you for a student for longer than that, but that is the minimum for me to be able to say anything meaningful about you.
When you ask for a letter, please don’t assume that the answer will be “yes.” If I don’t think it’s in your best interests for me to write you a letter, I won’t do it, and begging me to reconsider is likely to make things worse.
If I agree to write you a letter or letters, please download this form, fill out the requested information, and compile the requested materials, at least two weeks before the letter is due.
If you are asking for multiple letters at the same time, please provide a summary page that lists all of the programs you are applying to, and their due dates, in chronological order. Please don’t be afraid to ask for multiple letters of recommendation – once I have written one, it’s much easier to write others for additional programs.
Please check back in with me if I have agreed to write a letter and you haven’t heard anything. If, for example, you haven’t heard from me that I have submitted the letter, and there’s only a week left before it’s due, please send me an e-mail asking if I have submitted it because it’s due in a week!
Finally: Please keep me informed of your progress! If I’m writing you a letter of reference, it means that I think you are an excellent student and am taking the time to try to help you succeed. Please let me know whether you’ve been accepted into a program and/or what your future plans are!
For a complete list of my presentations and publications, please see my CV.
To gain access to specific materials mentioned, please go to my Academia.edu page.
Along with a team of RAs, I have created free, open-source software to aid in doing phonological analysis on corpora. You can download the software, feature files, and user’s manual for PCT on the GitHub release page. See this video for an overview of the software, and this page for the complete documentation.