HomeWhy do we say the things we do? Studying patterns in relative clause placement Margo Katherine Wilke Undergraduate Research Internship Program Spring 2026 Accepted Corpus linguistics, language use, relative clause, linguistic annotation We can use different sentence structures to express similar meanings. For example, a relative clause can be placed in different positions of an English sentence. It can appear right after the noun (e.g., The book that I bought yesterday is great), or it can be moved to the end (e.g., The book is great that I bought yesterday). This phenomenon is called extraposition. Why do speakers sometimes choose one sentence structure over the other? We aim to answer this question by investigating what linguistic factors (e.g., relative clause length, definiteness, information density) influence this choice, and how they do so, by combining human annotation and computational methods. Students will contribute to a research pipeline in which annotated linguistic features are used to build and evaluate information-theoretic and machine-learning models of grammatical choice. Elaine J Francis The interns’ main responsibilities will involve assisting with linguistic feature annotation, for example, labeling the length of different sentence segments, determining whether a subject is definite or indefinite, and identifying the type of predicate. As part of this role, you will gain hands-on experience with linguistic annotation, learn how linguists analyze sentence structure choices, and work closely with a graduate researcher. Depending on your contribution and the progress of the project, you also have potential opportunity to present your work at the undergraduate research symposium. https://cla.purdue.edu/english/francislab/ Having some background in linguistics (for example, having taken an introductory linguistics course) is preferred, but not required. Annotation guidelines and training will be provided. You do not need to be a native speaker of English for this position. 2 6 (estimated)