Hope Morgan

Hope Morgan is a alumnus from the first anthropogeny graduate specialization cohort. She completed her PhD at the UCSD in 2017, writing a phonological grammar of Kenyan Sign Language. Hope held a post-doctoral research position at the University of Haifa in Israel from 2017-2019, and was a LEaDing Fellowship post-doc at Leiden University from 2019-2021. Currently, she is a post-doctoral researcher at the Radboud University in the Centre for Language Studies and Dept. of Language & Communication in Nijmegen.  Hope's research primarily focuses on the systemic properties of sign language lexicons, guided by the following questions. How do signs emerge and take on categorical formational properties in relation to other signs in a lexicon (i.e., phonology and morphology)? How are those forms constrained by communicative and learnability pressures, such as confusability, frequency, articulatory ease, and phonological complexity? And how do meanings become encoded in form within a lexical network, at both the level of word meaning, as well as in the motivated sub-parts of words, including iconic motivations and metaphoric reference?