Mike Opper


Linguistics Ph.D. Student (Candidate)


University of Michigan

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About Me:

I am a third-year student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan. I am primarily interested in phonology and its interfaces with other components of grammar (specifically morphology and syntax).
My Qualifying Research Paper (which was co-advised by Professors Andries Coetzee and San Duanmu) investigated the prosodic properties of truncated compounds in English (such as sci-fi from science fiction). Please e-mail me (opper@umich.edu) for a copy if you are interested. Comments are welcome!

Presently, I am working on a couple projects. One of my more developed projects is a comparative analysis of "word-length flexibility" in Chinese, English, and Nuosu Yi. I presented this research as part of a workshop for graduate student research within the Center for Chinese Studies. The chair of my presentation was Professor William H Baxter.

I have GSI'd (that is, taught recitation sections) for Ling 111 (Intro to Linguistics) in both Fall 2011 and Winter 2012. I solo taught Ling 112 (Languages of the World) in Summer 2012. Ling 112 is a course I designed myself which is a general survey of major linguistic regions and basic tools for linguistic analysis.

I completed my undergraduate degree in Chinese and Linguistics at Rutgers University in spring 2010. At Rutgers, I discovered my interests in Chinese Dialectology with Professor Richard V. Simmons and Phonology with Professor Paul de Lacy who co-advised my BA thesis on Taiwan Hakka (downloadable on my papers page).

In addition to all of these scholarly activities, I have studied Chinese as a second language extensively. Much of my language study was part of my undergraduate degree, but I have also participated in several "immersion" programs abroad - short term study organized by Rutgers at Nanjing University (summer 2007), summer study at the 國語教學中心 within Taiwan National Normal University (2009), and the summer program offered by Inter-University Program at Tsinghua University (2011). Feel free to contact me about any of these programs.

In my free time I enjoy listening to classic rock, biking and rowing.