Apart from the usual teaching, admin and research tasks, the last semester saw me engaged in a number of extra-curricular activities. They were a lot of fun!

First, I ran my fourth Undergraduate Scholars Programme. This year, we extended the Student-Transcribed Corpus of Spoken American English to speakers born before 1940 and used the material to study variation in indefinite animate pronouns. I would like to thank all participants:

-Yanran Xiong
-Bomiao Zhang
-Jingwen Zhang
-Xuanzi Zhao
-Zixun Lin

Unfortunately, technical issues made it impossible to record the final showcase presentation this year.

Secondly, I hosted Martina Giarda, a PhD Student from the University of Pavia / University of Bergamo. It was a pleasure to have her and would like to thank her for many interesting discussions.

Third, I had the pleasure of supervising Sophie, a student intern. She is studying at the Altrincham Grammar School for Girls and completed her one-week work experience at the University of Manchester. Sophie contributed an excellent transcript to the spoken corpus, for which I'd like to thank her.

With another successful semester coming to its close, I'm looking forward to new opportunities and challenges in the future and to some relaxation during the summer.