Overview

I am an Assistant Professor of English and Linguistics and the Director of Linguistics at Wichita State University, where I direct the Menon Lab. I received my PhD in Linguistics from University of Southern California in August 2016. I am the Liberal Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Academic Advisor for Linguistics at Wichita State and an Associate Editor of the  Journal of South Asian Linguistics. 

Center for Educational Technologies to Assist Refugee Learners (CETARL)

Principal Investigator Menon has established relationships with the African refugee community of Wichita through her LING 668: Field Methods of Linguistics class offered in Spring 2020. Through this class, she learnt Swahili from two refugee language consultants who are undergraduate students of WSU. These refugee language consultants will continue to this project through the next three years. As a Service- Learning Faculty Scholar 2019-2020, she has established several community partnerships, including with the International Rescue Committee (IRC), St. Francis Ministries, and the Kansas Leadership Institute. See attached letters of support from these institutions in Appendix B. PI Menon’s expertise includes working with under represented populations such as the refugee population in Wichita, the Potawatomi tribe in Mayetta KS, and conducting research among these populations by quantitative and qualitative data collection. She has supervised a senior honors thesis, submitted May 2020, titled “Intercultural Competency in TESOL: A Study of Immigrant English Leaners” where data was collected from 48 immigrant students at WSU. In addition, she has published an article with an undergraduate student in Applied Studies on the effects of war and displacement on Palestinian Arabic. She has also supervised several IRB-approved student final projects investigating attitudes towards immigrants on the Wichita State Campus. This presentation was part of the Tilford Workshop in 2019. Since 2015, PI Menon has been the Linguistics Advisor and Company Mentor of ‘Subverses Inc.’, an early-stage language learning startup building a suite of language learning tools around their interactive spy video game.

Information

Academic Interests and Expertise

Education:

  • Ph.D. in Linguistics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles (2016)
  • M.A. in Linguistics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles (2012)
  • MPhil in English (Linguistics), The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India (2008)
  • M.A in Linguistics, Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India (2006)
  • B.A in Communicative English, Mahatma Gandhi University, India (2004)

Research Interests:

  • Syntax
  • Semantics
  • Cognitive Processing
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Language documentation and revitalization
  • Indigeneous and Minority languages
  • Accessible educational technologies
  • Refugee and migration studies
  • Misinformation spread on the web
  • Cybersecurity and socially engineered attacks
Areas of Research Interest
  • Issues at the interface of Syntax and Semantics
    • Expression of degree modification, predication, and comparison
    • Adjectival structure and meaning
    • Argument ellipsis
    • Plurals and the mass/count distinction
    • Focus markers
  • Cognitive processing
    • Language and music
    • Language in visual narrative
    • Artificial language learning
  • Indigenous and Minority Language documentation and revitalization
    • Potawatomi
    • Judeo-Malayalam
    • Swahili spoken by the Congolese refugee community
Areas of Teaching Interest

Instructor for LING 668- Field Methods of Linguistics
Spring 2020
Wichita State University

Instructor for LING 665- History of the English Language
Spring 2018
Wichita State University

Instructor for LING 152- The Language of Food
Fall 2017
Wichita State University 

Instructor for LING 315- History and Structure of English
Fall 2016, Spring 2017
Wichita State University

Instructor for LING 317- Introduction to Linguistics
Fall 2016, 2017, 2018; Spring 2017, 2018
Wichita State University

Instructor for LING 151- The Nature of Language
Spring 2017, 2018
Wichita State University

Teaching assistant for LING 115- Language, Culture, and Society
Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014
University of Southern California

Teaching assistant for LING 110- In a Word
Spring 2012
University of Southern California

Co-instructor with Professor Hemalatha Nagarajan, Fall 2009
The English and Foreign Languages University
Course: History and Structure of English (Integrated M.A course)

Teaching Assistant, 2006 - 2008
The English and Foreign Languages University
Courses: Basic Issues in Semantics (for Hany Babu M.T), Introduction to Linguistics (Graduate courses)

Co-Instructor with Professor P.Madhavan, Fall 2008
The English and Foreign Languages University
Course: Basic Issues in Semantics (Graduate course)

Tutor, 2007-2008
The English and Foreign Languages University
Post Graduate Certificate in Teaching English

Instructor, May-June 2007
Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL)
Introduction to Syntax

Publications

1. García-Pardo, Alfredo and Mythili Menon. 2020.  The Aspectual Structure of the Adjective: Spanish Ser and Estar.  In, Alfonso Morales-Front, Michael J. Ferreira, Ronald P Leow, and Cristina Sanz (eds.) Hispanic Linguistics: Current Issues and New Directions. Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 26, Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

2.Menon, Mythili and Roumyana Pancheva. 2019. Degree Achievements of Color. In, Mónica Cabrera and José Camacho (eds.) Exploring Interfaces. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 85-108.

3. Sleiman, Jamillah and Mythili Menon. (2019). The Changing of Arabic Terminology in Times of War and Displacement. In Temkin Martinez et al. eds, WECOL Proceedings.

4. Menon, Mythili and Rachel Showstack. (2019). Measure Phrases in Spanish Second Language Learners and Heritage Speakers. In Temkin Martinez et al. eds, WECOL Proceedings.

5. Menon, Mythili. 2018. Domain General Representations shared across Music and Language. Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences 23 (2), 64-86.

6. Menon, Mythili. 2017. Building Superlatives from Property Concepts. In, Proceedings of Linguistics Society of America 2, 34:1-9. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v2i0.4086

7. Menon, Mythili. 2017. The Standard Marker in Malayalam encodes Comparative Semantics. InProceedings of the 34th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, ed. Aaron Kaplan et al., 379-386. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

8. Menon, Mythili. 2016. Reevaluating Standard Analyses of Comparison: The View from Malayalam. In M. Menon and S. Saurov (eds.) Proceedings of FASAL 6.

9. Menon, Mythili,and Roumyana Pancheva. 2016. Decomposing color expressions in Malayalam. In S. Sundaresan and R. Balusu eds.Proceedings of FASAL V, pp. 3-20.

10. Wang, Felix Hao, Mythili Menon, Elsi Kaiser. 2015. Statistical Structures in Artificial languages Prime Relative Clause Attachment Biases in English. In D. C. Noelle, R. Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings, & P. P. Maglio (Eds.),Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. 

11. Menon, Mythili, Roumyana Pancheva. 2014. The grammatical life of property concept roots in Malayalam. In U. Etxeberria, A. Fălăuș, A. Irurtzun, B. Leferman eds., Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 2013, pp. 289-302.

12. Menon, Mythili. 2014. Property Concepts and the Apparent Lack of Adjectives in Dravidian. In, Pritha Chandra and Richa Srishti (eds.) The Lexicon-Syntax Interface: Perspectives from South Asian Languages. pp 25-52.

13. Simpson, Andrew, Arunima Choudhury, Mythili Menon. 2013. The derivation and licensing of covert nominals in Bangla, Hindi, and Malayalam. Lingua 134, 103-128.

14. Menon, Mythili. 2013. The Apparent Lack of Adjectives in Malayalam and other Related Languages. In Nobu Goto, Koichi Otaki, Atsushi Sato, Kensuke Takita eds. Proceedings of Glow-in-Asia IX 2012: The Main Session. Mie University, Japan, pp. 157-171.

15. Menon, Mythili. 2012. Adverbial Comparatives: Evidence from Malayalam. In: Ana Aguilar, Anna Chernilovskaya & Rick Nouwen (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 16 vol 2. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, pp. 461-474.

16. Simpson, Andrew, ∘Arunima Choudhury, ∘Mythili Menon. 2012. South Asian Perspectives on Argument Ellipsis. In, Bum-Sik Park eds. Three factors and Syntactic Theory. Proceedings of the 14th Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar, pp. 370-389.

17. Menon, Mythili and Syed Saurov. 2016. Proceedings of the Sixth Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (FASAL 6). Online at Journal of South Asian Languages.

18. Mohanty, Rajat Kumar and Mythili Menon. 2009. Universals and Variation. Proceedings of the Seventh GLOW-in Asia. The English and Foreign Languages Press, EFLU, Hyderabad.

19. Menon, Mythili. 2018. Absence. Mikrokosmos Literary Journal.

Professional Experience

2010- present   Linguistic Society of America (LSA)

2013- present   Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC)

2013-present   Women in Cognitive Science (WiCS)

2014- present   Cognitive Science Society (CSS)   

Awards and Honors

2021                 Young Faculty Risk Taker Award

2021                  United Way of the Plains Impact on the Plains Game Changer Award in Education

2021-2022       Recruitment Faculty Fellow

2020-2021       Cohen Honors College Faculty Fellow 

2019-2020       Service Learning Faculty Fellow Scholar

2018-2019       Tilford Fellow

Grants

July 2022-2024  Studying Socially Engineered Attacks Among Refugee Learners, $296, 467, PI, The National Science Foundation

August 2020    Creating Educational Technologies for Refugee Learners, $300,000, PI

Summer 2019 Award for Research/Creative Projects in Summer (ARCS), Wichita State University $4,000 (for fieldwork in Cochin, India), PI,  Documenting the language and culture of Jewish People of Cochin

Jan 01, 2018-   Multidisciplinary Research Project Grant (MURPA), Wichita State University June 15, 2018    Investigating Spread of Misinformation on the Web by Analyzing Online Sharing Behavior, (w/Murtuza Jadliwala, Dept. of EECS, University of Texas-San Antonio),   $7,500, PI

Dec 01 2016-  University Research/Creative Projects Award (URCA), Wichita State University

Dec 31 2017    Documenting Indigenous Food and Language of Potawatomi Indians in Kansas, $4,500

Summer 2013  University of Southern California Del Amo Fellowship, Language and Music research in Madrid, Spain, $4,000 

2008-2011       University Grants Commission, India, Senior Research Fellowship (SRF), $10,000

2005-2008       University Grants Commission, India, Junior Research Fellowship (JRF), $8,000

 

Areas of Service

2016- present   Language and Linguistics Colloquium Series Organizer (Along with Rachel Showstack), WSU

2017-present   Faculty Sponsor and founder, WichiLing, Linguistics Club and Registered Student Organization, WSU

2017-present    Founder and organizer of FoodLang Brown Bag Lunch Reading Group

Additional Information

Visit my personal website for additional information.