Alina Kordesch, a senior in Japanese and Linguistics, won the second prize in the Humanities category at OSU's 18th Denman Undergraduate Research Forum held on March 28th at RPAC.  Her poster, entitled “Loss of face: An analysis of physical and social face overlap in Japanese,” stood out among about two dozen presentations by peer Humanities students. In the poster she argued that the Japanese grammaticalized expression "kao-o tsubusu" does not include the actor's own face, but the person's face/mask the actor represents. This was proved by conducting a corpus examination. Click here for the official announcement and here for the abstract.

The advisors for her study are DEALL professors Mineharu Nakayama and Etsuyo Yuasa.

This year's Denman Forum attracted a record level of participation (more than 700 students from all disciplines at OSU). According to the official website, the Forum “was created in 1996 and is a cooperative effort of the Undergraduate Research Office, the University Honors & Scholars Center, and the Office of Research. The Forum is an opportunity to showcase outstanding student research and encourage all undergraduates to participate in research as a value-added element of their education.”