Author: Nancy Foasberg

Welcome to the July 2023 edition of QC Research Highlights!

This month, as always, we’re featuring some recent faculty publications. While this series doesn’t always feature a theme, this month, we have some articles related to community support and cultural relevance. Please enjoy, and thanks as always to the authors!

All the works featured in this series are available to read and download for free from CUNY Academic Works. 

Grace Pai (Elementary and Early Childhood Education), in her article “Creating a Culturally Relevant Statistics Assignment on z-scores,” stresses that cultural relevance, if it is to be more than a mere buzzword, must be based on a specific understanding of the students in question. She describes the process of creating a culturally relevant statistics assignment, which starts by approaching the subject matter as a meaningful way to address problems that the students care about. In this case, students used statistics to interpret the response to a question about safety on the 2017 NYC School Survey, in the wake of a recent killing in a New York City school. Students worked with survey responses describing how safe the respondents felt, clearly connecting the statistical analysis they were doing to the process of decision-making. Further, this work led to a conversation about school safety in which students considered how they could be agents of change.  Pai provides thoughtful pedagogical recommendations for developing similar assignments.

The article “Development and Modification of a Culturally Tailored Education Program to Prevent Breast Cancer in Korean Immigrant Women in New York City,” was a collaborative effort by several authors, including Sung Eun Choi (Fitness, Nutrition, and Exercise Science) as well as Jin Young Seo (Hunter College), So-Hyun Park (Hunter College), Minkyung Lee (Santa Clara Valley Medical Center), and Shiela M. Strauss (Hunter College, New York University). To address the rising rates of breast cancer among Korean-American women and the underutilization of healthcare services among that population, the authors developed the Korean Breast Cancer Risk Reduction Program, a community-based and culturally-tailored educational program. They did a pilot study at Korean Community Services of Metropolitan New York, which is in Queens. They worked with participants on changing their diets and increasing physical activity; additionally, they created brochures and offered free trainings. The participants responded positively and made suggestions to improve the cultural relevance of the program (for instance, by developing meal suggestions compatible with a traditional Korean diet).

The article “Expanding the Conceptualization of Support in Low-Wage Carework: The Case of Home Care Aides and Client Death” has many authors; one of them is QC’s Sherry Baron (Barry Commoner Center for Health and the Environment). The other authors are Emma K. Tsui (CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy), Marita LaMonica (CUNY Graduate School of Public Heath & Health Policy), Maryam Hyder (Barnard College), Paul Landsbergis (SUNY School of Public Health), and Jennifer Zelnick (Touro College).  The authors of the study interviewed home healthcare workers in New York City about the support structures they access to deal with client death.  Agencies offered some forms of support via coordinators, training programs, other types of programmatic support, and the union. However, this support was often inadequate and not all workers knew they could access it.  Instead, many relied on personal support from family and friends or their religious communities, or blended support from co-workers or the deceased’s family and friends. Blended support, however, was often discouraged by the agencies for privacy reasons and to maintain boundaries. The authors propose a model of work stress that takes these different types of support into account. Further, they point out that healthcare workers are very often women from marginalized communities, thus, they may be seeking support from communities that are already strained. The authors have some recommendations for worker- and community-focused solutions.

This is one of a series of blog posts featuring faculty publications in CUNY Academic Works. Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing access to the research, scholarship, and creative and pedagogical work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all. 

If you would like to share your research in Academic Works, please see this guide to Academic Works, or contact Nancy.Foasberg@qc.cuny.edu.

Welcome to the June 2023 edition of QC Research Highlights!

This month, as always, we’re featuring some recent faculty publications. Please enjoy, and thanks as always to the authors!

All the works featured in this series are available to read and download for free from CUNY Academic Works. 

The article “Cosmogenic Ages Indicate No MIS 2 Refugia in the Alexander Archipelago, Alaska” was the work of a group of authors, including Alia Lesnek (Earth and Environmental Science), along with Caleb K. Walcott (University at Buffalo), Jason P. Briner (University at Buffalo), James F. Baichtal (Tongass National Forest), and Joseph M. Licciardi (University of New Hampshire, Durham). The article is about the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, one of several ice sheets covering North America during the Last Glacial Maximum. The researchers were interested in improving the mapping of the ice sheet by studying when deglaciation occurred in the Alexander Archipelago, in southeastern Alaska. They sampled bedrock and boulders in the area for beryllium surface exposure dating in University at Buffalo’s Cosmogenic Isotope Laboratory. Looking at the northern areas of the region, which had previously been mapped as free of ice during the time period in question, this study found evidence that at least some of these areas were actually covered in ice and didn’t experience deglaciation until later. The article also discusses the implications of this for plants and humans.

Amy Hsin (Sociology) and co-author Sofya Aptekar (CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies) wrote “The Violence of Asylum: The Case of Undocumented Chinese Migration to the US.” Chinese undocumented migrants are an understudied group, so the researchers wanted to see how the legal violence of immigration law affects this population specifically. While US asylum policies make Chinese migrants more often eligible for asylum than migrants from Central America or Mexico, the asylum system is very expensive and can take years to navigate. Thus, a network of migrant legal services has arisen in the Chinese community, but raids on these services have led to increased scrutiny and a decline in asylum approval rates. The authors of the article interviewed many participants in the system, including undocumented/formerly undocumented Chinese migrants and those who work with them, such as legal workers, teachers, community organizers, and more. The article examines what has been called the “architectures of repulsion,” barriers put in place to make migration more difficult. The experiences of the participants demonstrate how the legal structure creates widely varying levels of difficulty based on differing socioeconomic statuses, as well as favoring certain types of migration over others.

The article, “The Rise and Fall of Dopamine: A Two-Stage Model of the Development and Entrenchment of Anorexia Nervosa,” by Jeff Beeler (Psychology) and co-author Nesha S. Burghart (Hunter College), proposes a model for the role of dopamine in eating disorders. So far, research has shown a link between anorexia and dopamine, but it’s not yet clear whether dopamine is increased or decreased, nor whether abnormal dopamine levels are a risk for anorexia or a result of it. The authors suggest that there are two stages; in the first stage, weight loss triggers an increase in dopamine production, while in the second stage, as anorexia becomes more entrenched, repeated exposure causes dopamine to decrease, much like it does in the case of addiction. If correct, this model has important implications for treatment, as the first and second stages could be treated differently. The authors recommend further studies to test this hypothesis.

This is one of a series of blog posts featuring faculty publications in CUNY Academic Works. Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing access to the research, scholarship, and creative and pedagogical work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all. 

If you would like to share your research in Academic Works, please see this guide to Academic Works, or contact Nancy.Foasberg@qc.cuny.edu.

Welcome to the May 2023 edition of QC Research Highlights!

This month, we’re featuring the following works by faculty authors, on many different subjects! Thanks for reading, and as always, thanks to the authors who have contributed their works.

All the works featured in this series are available to read and download for free from CUNY Academic Works. 

Dan Lee (Mathematics) researches geometrical analysis and is particularly interested in mass in general relativity. He and coauthor Lan-Hsuan Huang (University of Connecticut) have an article, “Trapped Surfaces, Topology of Black Holes, and the Positive Mass Theorem,”  in which they build on Roger Penrose’s work analyzing black holes with geometrical and topological approaches. One of the things that’s interesting about Huang and Lee’s article is that it shows how mathematics and physics work together. This article deals with trapped surfaces (regions from which light cannot escape; that is, they are inside black holes), but focuses more specifically on marginally outer trapped surfaces (MOTS), which lie at the intersection of the trapped region and its horizon. The article lays out the theorems that have been used to understand the topology of black holes, including Hawking’s theorem that under certain conditions, a MOTS must be a topological sphere, and the positive mass theorem, which has several implications, including that the sources for Einstein’s equations should not behave as if they were traveling faster than light. The authors have shown that this works differently at higher spatial dimensions.

Jeffrey Halperin (Psychology) specializes in the treatment of children with ADHD. He is one of the authors of the article “Distinct Thalamic and Frontal Neuroanatomical Substrates in Children with Familial vs. Non-Familial Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD),” along with four coauthors: Rahman Baboli and Meng Cao (both from New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University) and Xiaobo Li (New Jersey Institute of Technology). This article is about the relationship between ADHD and the physical structures of the brain; specifically, it examines the differences between children with ADHD whose parents have also been diagnosed with it (familial), and other children with ADHD (nonfamilial). The researchers recruited a large group of participants and use MRI imaging to study their brains. Compared to the neurotypical subjects, the subjects with ADHD (both familial and non-familial) tended to have a smaller cuneus – a region of the brain associated with processing visual information.  Between the two groups that had ADHD, the familial group tended to have a larger thalamus than the non-familial group. This is a part of the brain involved in the circuit of brain areas that manage attention and cognitive processing. With this and a few other differences, the study suggests that familial ADHD may be more severe than non-familial.

For this first time, this column would also like to feature a work that wasn’t written in English! That is, “Mas yo resto: Entrevista con Nancy Morejón,” an interview conducted by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario (English), whose specialty is nineteenth through twenty-first century US Latinx and Caribbean literature and culture. She is also the editor of the journal Small Axe. This interview, conducted in Spanish, is with Nancy Morejón, a well-known Cuban poet, essayist, and critic. In this interview, they discuss Morejón’s life and writings. She began publishing poetry at the age of seventeen, and when El Puente, a group that published new writers, published her work along with that of several other writers of note. She studied French at the University of Havana and wrote her thesis about Aimé Césaire, whom she ended up meeting many years later. Morejón’s work was influenced by Césaire, Nicolás Guillén, and many others. The interview goes on to discuss Morejón’s work and philosophy, including the importance of multilingualism.

Finally, Kevin Birth (Anthropology), who studies the relationship between time and culture, has an article on the pedagogy he uses to help students think of time as culturally contingent: “Teaching Time; Disrupting Common Sense.” His course considers the difference between conventional expressions of time (calendars, clocks, and so on) and the experience of time. He asks students to think creatively about concepts and representations of time. He uses several fascinating strategies to encourage students to think more critically about time and highlight how time is constructed in a cultural context. His assignments use creative due dates based on obscure historical calendars, leap days, natural astronomical cycles, and the lives of plants, as well as relative time measures (“two weeks from now”). Among other things, he asks students to consider the clock both as a cultural artifact and a machine that can be manipulated, and demonstrates the differences between the length of the hour at different historical times with the “world’s worst drum solo.” The class considers capitalist metaphors for time, scientific paradoxes involving time, and more. In any case, as we draw toward the end of the semester, it may be useful to remember that all our measures of time are arbitrary and culturally contingent.

This is one of a series of blog posts featuring faculty publications in CUNY Academic Works. Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing access to the research, scholarship, and creative and pedagogical work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all. 

If you would like to share your research in Academic Works, please see this guide to Academic Works, or contact Nancy.Foasberg@qc.cuny.edu.

Welcome to the March edition of QC Research Highlights!

Every month, we feature a few articles showcasing the work of QC authors. Please enjoy this month’s selection of faculty publications!

Thanks to all the authors who have contributed their works.

All the works featured in this series are available to read and download for free from CUNY Academic Works. 

Math and Natural Sciences

Eve Bernstein (Family, Nutrition and Exercise Science)’s article, “Students’ Perceived Experiences of Competitive Activities through Electronic Platforms,” analyzed what middle school students said on YouTube about competitive activities in physical education courses. She analyzed 26 videos of students talking about their experiences. Since participation in physical activities declines after middle school, she thought it was especially important to understand the students’ perspectives at that stage. In the videos, students’ perception of their own skill level deeply influences their experience; less-skilled students became embarrassed or lost interest. Bernstein suggests that activities should be structured in such a way as to alleviate the experience of failure and not make students feel powerless. She critiques the teacher-centered approach shown in the clips.

Education

Toni Spring (Elementary and Early Education) researches children’s eyewitness testimony through the lens of moral decision-making. In the article “Gender Differences in Moral Influences on Adolescents’ Eyewitness Identification,” Spring, along with co-authors Herbert D. Saltzstein (Graduate Center, CUNY) and Leeann Siegel (University of Pennsylvania), works to reveal implicit moral decision-making in adolescents, considering both age and gender. After watching a video in which one character stole a cell phone from another, the study participants answered some questions indicating how bad the character’s actions were and how severely they believed she should be punished. Finally, they were asked to identify the character from a selection of photos. This study differed from others in this area because it used female actors. The older children and the girls used more stringent criteria in identifying the culprit and were more likely to focus on fairness rather than prevention.

Humanities

In her article, Debility and Disability in Edith Wharton’s Novels, Karen Weingarten (English) argues that Edith Wharton’s understanding of disability in some ways anticipates modern disability studies. Considering Ethan Frome, The Fruit of the Tree, and Summer, Weingarten analyzes how Wharton situates disability within the economic and political circumstances of her characters. Ultimately, Weingarten argues for a distinction between disability, which can be understood as an identity category, and debility, which is a condition brought on by economic conditions. Disability as an identity is available to those characters whose social position entitles them to the support of the community, whereas debilitation describes the condition of those who have suffered injury or illness due to the working and living conditions of capitalism. Ultimately, Weingarten argues: “As a tracing of the representation of disability and debility in Wharton’s novels demonstrates, disabled—and debilitated—people’s oppression has always been tied to economic, racial, and sexual politics.”

Thank you to all the authors whose works are listed here!  

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This is one of a series of blog posts featuring faculty publications in CUNY Academic Works. Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing access to the research, scholarship, and creative and pedagogical work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all. 

If you would like to share your research in Academic Works, please see this guide to Academic Works, or contact Nancy.Foasberg@qc.cuny.edu.

If you would like to share your research in Academic Works, please see this guide to Academic Works, or contact Nancy.Foasberg@qc.cuny.edu.  

Welcome to the December edition of QC Research Highlights! This month, we will feature a few articles by QC faculty authors who are interested in bilingualism, cultural exchange, and the migration of literary forms from one language to another.   

Thanks to all the authors who have contributed their works.

All the works featured in this series are available to read and download for free from CUNY Academic Works. 

Education

Embracing multilingualism to improve pedagogy, Marcela Ossa Parra (Elementary and Early Childhood Education) and co-author Patrick Proctor of Boston College argue for a pedagogy of translanguaging in their article,  “The Translanguaging Pedagogies Continuum.”  Translanguaging pedagogy steps away from monolingualism to integrate students’ home languages and other communicative repertories. The authors, using the metaphor of the corriente (current) put translanguaging pedagogical practices along a three-point continuum (listening to the corriente, channeling the corriente, and flowing with the corriente) depending on how thoroughly the instructors integrate multilingual students’ language practices into the class. Translanguaging pedagogy breaks up the artificial notion of language separation and creates a method of valuing students and their home cultures in the classroom. Teachers who do not speak the same languages as their multilingual students can still engage in this form of pedagogy; Ossa Parra and Proctor provide some strategies at each point along their continuum and explain the benefits of using translanguaging pedagogy – for both the students and the teacher. At every point of the continuum, it is essential to recognize students’ language practices – and by extension, their cultures – as valuable in the classroom.  

On the other hand, there is also a business aspect to cultural exchange, even in the field of education. Daisuke Akiba‘s (School of Education) article, “Recruitment of International Students through a Synthesis of English as a Second Language Instruction, Social Justice, and Service Learning,” is interested in how American colleges and universities can attract international students.  In particular, he is interested in strategies for institutions other than large, well-known research universities. Akiba describes a pilot program undertaken at a diverse, urban public college in the northeastern United States, with the goal of attracting Japanese students to study education there. Assessment revealed that the students in question were interested in short-term programs, the opportunity to improve their English with content-area, credit-bearing courses, and low tuition. The pilot program had a social justice focus and sought to meet these specific student needs, thus filling a niche that more well-known institutions might not. Akiba suggests this strategy may be successful for recruiting international students to regional colleges and universities.

English

Of course, the results are quite different when speakers of the language are not directly involved. Roger Sedarat (English) looks carefully at Walt Whitman’s use of Persian poetry in “The Battle Trumpet Blown!”: Whitman’s Persian Imitations in Drum-Taps. Whitman’s exposure to Persian poetry was largely through Ralph Waldo Emerson and (especially significant for this article) William Alger. Sedarat argues that Whitman was deeply influenced by Persian poetry during the Civil War, using it to move away from the individualism expressed in his earlier works to seek mystical transcendence. Sedarat carefully analyzes Whitman’s imitations of specific poems from Alger’s book, The Poetry of the East, in Whitman’s collection Drum-Taps.  He shows how Whitman turns the notion of spiritual surrender found in these poems to his own ends in making an argument for national unity, while at the same time employing Orientalist tropes of the “old and meditative East.” Sedarat’s article is interested in how Whitman imitated Persian poets at the very moment that he became a distinctly American poet, achieving the “transformation of his American vision through an Orientalist gaze toward Iran.” 

This is one of a series of blog posts featuring faculty publications in CUNY Academic Works. Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing access to the research, scholarship, and creative and pedagogical work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all. 

If you would like to share your research in Academic Works, please see this guide to Academic Works, or contact Nancy.Foasberg@qc.cuny.edu.

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Welcome to the November edition of QC Research Highlights! This month will feature some publications by Queens College faculty that have to do with community love and support in various contexts: disaster preparedness, recovery from mental illness, children’s writings, and human connection to the natural world.

Thanks to all the authors who have contributed their works.

All the works featured in this series are available to read and download for free from CUNY Academic Works. 

Social Sciences

Anna Bounds (Sociology) explores how New York City disaster preppers responded to COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic in her article, “The Rise of Prepping in New York City: Community Resilience and COVID-19”. Bounds studied the New York City Prepper’s Network, a group that aims to prepare for disasters and to share knowledge to help their communities survive under such circumstances. As this article points out, New York City has endured numerous disasters throughout the years. While self-sufficiency is a value often associated with preppers, Bounds shows that one role of such a group is to build the social infrastructure to support survival in the case of a disaster. NYCDN teaches preparedness, organizes its members, and connects to local experts. Their work builds community resilience.

Murphy Halliburton (Anthropology), in his chapter “The House of Love and the Mental Hospital: Zones of Care and Recovery in South India,” shows how community care in South India aids recovery from schizophrenia and related disorders. While he resists romanticizing the Indian family, Halliburton emphasizes sneham, caring love, which is distinct from romantic love. Through a series of patient interviews, he noted that those patients whose families were most involved in their care fared better in their recovery. Those who were most isolated from their families talked about their loss of loving connections, while those who were recovering well attributed their success to their connection with their families. The article also examines a psychosocial rehabilitation center, Sneehavedu, which takes in the mentally ill who have no families and attempts to provide caring and affection for them. While they do refer patients to mental hospitals when necessary, the support they get at the rehabilitation center also enables recovery.

Education

Ted Kesler (Elementary and Early Childhood Education), in his article “’Does it Have to be a Real Story? A Social Semiotic Assessment of an Emerging Writer,” examines the interpersonal qualities of young children’s writings, which are overlooked by assessment instruments.  Positioning himself as a parent-researcher, Kesler uses a writing event with his young son as a source of formative assessment. He recorded and coded an interaction during which his son composed and explained a story. Kesler analyzes how his son interacted with him during this process; the child made deliberate choices about his story but also sought approval along the way. This process was performative and interpersonal. Kesler recommends this strategy of formative assessment – interacting with children and observing their writing process to better understand and support their learning. This form of observation gives a richer sense of how children go about their writing and seek support for it, whereas forms of assessment that focus on the writing product risk missing this interpersonal aspect of children’s writing. He describes his approach as “naturalistic research, based in relationship and love.”

Arts and Humanities

The last article featured in this post complicates these ideas about the virtue of community. Leila Walker (Library) is the author of the “Elizabeth Kent’s New Tales of Botanical Friendship.” As Walker explains, Elizabeth Kent was a nineteenth-century writer whose work includes children’s stories and botanical works. Kent is remembered as a member of the so-called “Cockney School,” which was deeply attached to sociability.  Walker argues that Kent’s botanical works exemplify the Cockney School’s philosophy by gathering together poems as plants (thus linking poetry to the natural world) in a collection where the poets of her social circle are linked to the poets of the past that they admired, imagining an ahistorical community among poets. At the same time, however, she is commenting from the margins of this community. Walker notes that Kent complains that her flowers – representing her friendships – have died. Furthermore, her use of plants is connected to the use of botanical metaphors to define women’s roles; Kent’s work resists the passivity associated with plants. Walker argues that “By collecting a Cockney canon from the margins, Kent uses the conventions of botanical and literary collecting to create a space for
herself within (and around) the networks of friendship that defined the Cockney community.”

This is one of a series of blog posts featuring faculty publications in CUNY Academic Works. Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing access to the research, scholarship, and creative and pedagogical work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all. 

If you would like to share your research in Academic Works, please see this guide to Academic Works, or contact Nancy.Foasberg@qc.cuny.edu.

Welcome to another edition of QC Research Highlights! Many QC Highlights posts in the past have focused on a theme linking the research presented. This post’s theme is centered around recently published 2022 articles. After all, Fall is a great time to catch up. Please enjoy the fascinating work of QC authors.

All the works featured in this series are available to read and download for free from CUNY Academic Works. 

Social Sciences

I would like to start with an article from none other than our president! Frank Wu (QC President) has written extensively on the history of race in the United States, with a particular interest in the status of Asian Americans. In his article, “Asian Americans Challenge the Official Racial Nationalism of the United States,” Wu examines the history of Asian American citizenship. He analyzes both the United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) and Korematsu v. United States (1948); in both these cases, the citizenship of individuals born in the United States to Asian immigrant parents was at stake.  Wong Kim Ark claimed his right to citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment, but the US solicitor general argued against it on racial nationalist grounds. Ultimately, the Supreme Court sided with Wong, and “the category of Chinese American was created.”  The Korematsu case, fifty years later, challenged the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, but the justices refused to rule on the issue of detention. Ultimately, Wu argues that citizenship must be maintained via political participation.

QC faculty are also participating in fruitful cross-disciplinary partnerships. Dana Weinberg (Sociology) and Adam Kapelner (Mathematics) co-authored the article “Do Book Consumers Discriminate against Black, Female, or Young Authors?” Weinberg’s scholarly focus is on writing in the digital age and discrimination in publishing, while Kapelner’s work is on experimental design and machine learning.  Weinberg and Kapelner noted the racial and gender inequalities in the publishing industry. In this article, they test the common assertion that readers discriminate by buying fewer books by Black, female, and young authors, thus making them a worse investment for publishers. For this study, the researchers created fictitious book covers with randomized genres, cover designs, and author names and photos, and had participants rate their level of interest in the books they supposedly represented. Participants in this study did not discriminate against Black or female authors, and in fact showed a preference for Black authors. Thus, the reluctance of publishers to publish books by Black and female authors is not rational. The authors suggest that publishers work to improve the diversity of their published authors.

Math and Natural Sciences

I’d also like to note a new work from a faculty member whose work also has been getting a lot of well-deserved national attention. A previous installment of QC Research Highlights featured the work of John Dennehy (Biology), whose team helped to develop a method of testing wastewater for COVID. Dennehy and the other authors, including many QC students and technicians (credited in the article), have continued this work with a new article, “Tracking Cryptic SARS-CoV-2 Lineages Detected in NYC Wastewater.” The researchers found that the wastewater carried traces of several mutations of COVID that are rarely seen in clinical settings. It may be that patients with these mutations simply were not sampled in a clinical setting, or that these lineages occur only in the gut and aren’t picked up by standard COVID tests. The article also considers whether these mutations may be carried by rats or other NYC mammals, however, the lack of animal DNA in the sample makes that unlikely. In any case, these variants showed some resistance to antibodies.

Arts and Humanities

Xiao Li (Classical, Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures) and Hongyong Liu (University of Macao) co-authored “Dimensional Adjectives in Nuosu Yi.” Li is a linguist who studies semantics and syntax-semantic interfaces. Nuosu Yi is a language spoken by the Yi people, a minority ethnic group in China. This paper focuses on dimensional adjectives, that is, adjectives describing concepts such as size, height, depth, and so on. Li and Liu distinguish between “positive adjectives,” which describe things, and “equative adjectives,” which compare things (“Ayi is tall” vs “Ayi is taller than Aguo.”) A few adjectives in Nuosu Yi form special constructions when they are changed from positive to equative adjectives.  As far as the researchers know, there are only ten of these. This is interesting not only for the study of Nuosu Yi but also for understanding how degree adjectives work across languages.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to all the authors whose work is included here!

This is one of a series of blog posts featuring faculty publications in CUNY Academic Works. Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing access to the research, scholarship, and creative and pedagogical work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all. 

If you would like to share your research in Academic Works, please see this guide to Academic Works, or contact Nancy.Foasberg@qc.cuny.edu.