Neil Wick's Academic Studies Page

University College In September of 1996, I started a part-time undergraduate degree program at the University of Toronto. I received my B.A. in Linguistics in May of 2000, and upgraded that to an Honours B.A. as of June, 2002.

In the Fall of 2002 I began a full-time Master's degree program in theoretical linguistics at York University in Toronto, graduating in September of 2004.

On the completion of my Masters degree, I began my Ph.D. studies at the University of Ottawa.

York University Grad Student Pictures:

Pictures of the Traditionalloweenned party on Nov. 2, 2002, in the linguistics department hosted by Natalia
Pictures from Viktor's party in October, 2002

Linguistics (major)

My undergrad major was Linguistics. The following topics represent some of my research areas and past projects.

Catastrophe Theory and Language Variation: I have begun to investigate the relationship between language variation and catastophe and chaos theory. See my catastrophe theory page for more details. I presented a paper on Applying Chaos and Complexity Theory to Language Variation Analysis at NWAV 31 in Stanford, California, in October, 2002.

Pronunciation Survey: I conducted a Survey on English Pronunciation Preferences. It's still available. Go ahead and try it. First results are also available at the same page.

Acoustic Analysis: In the Spring if 2000, I took a course in acoustic phonetic analysis. We used a Macintosh program called Signalyse which is very capable, although I found it sometimes less than compatible with newer Macs. Speech Filing System is a similar program for Windows, MS-DOS, and Unix, available free from University College in London, England.

Dictionary Project: In 1997/98, I spent 8 hours per week working on a long-term dictionary research project at the University of Toronto:

Useful links for English Dictionary research (revised May 14/99)
The current draft version of my Video Industry Jargon file (RTF format)

Portuguese (minor)

I've also completed in a minor program in Portuguese. I found this a challenge, since most students following this course of study come from a Portuguese-speaking home environment.

Anthropology (minor)

My major interests in linguistics generally lean toward sociolinguistics and dialectology, so several anthropology courses have helped me in this direction. I completed my anthropology minor in the spring of 2002.