Alexander Ratte, 5th year graduate student in DEALL presented a paper, “Diachrony or Synchrony? Accounting for the Old Japanese Particle -tu,” at the Penn Linguistics Colloqium (PLC 37) and presented research, “On the Origins of Japanese Dakuon Obstruents: Evidence from Korean,” at the International Conference on Phonetics and Phonology (ICPP 2013) with the help of an Arts and Humanities Graduate Research Small Grant.
In addition to receiving the Louise Zung-nyi Loh Memorial Scholarship from the East Asian Studies Center, Alex also received support for his dissertation research project, “Japanese and Korean: Towards a New Theory of Common Linguistic Origin,” in the form of an International Affairs Grant and the Global Gateway Graduate Student Research Abroad Grant from the Council of Graduate Students. Alex spent the summer as a visiting researcher at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) in Tokyo, Japan.
In Fall 2013, Alex will be presenting a paper entitled "Towards a Stronger Theory of Proto-Korean-Japanese" at the 23rd Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference (JK 23) at MIT, and a paper "Kara and Han: Reconstructing Peninsular Identities in Japanese and Korean" at the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs, a regional conference of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS).