By Nicole North

Maite Taboada, Cliff Goddard, and Radoslava (Rada) Trnavac recently published a paper with Cambridge University Press that was over a decade in the making: The ‘adverb-ly adjective’ construction in English: meanings, distribution and discourse functions. While it isn’t unusual for research to take many years to come to fruition, the story behind this publication is uniquely fascinating with all of its twists and turns.

Tell us about how this research relationship first came to be.

More than ten years ago, Rada Trnavac was here at SFU as a postdoctoral fellow and sessional instructor with Linguistics and Cognitive Science. We collaborated frequently. She had an existing connection to Cliff Goddard of Griffith University in Australia. When Rada saw that SFU and Griffith had a collaboration agreement, we applied for a travel grant to bring Cliff here to Vancouver. As I recall, he visited five times, during 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018, thanks to the SFU–Griffith collaboration program.

Together we published two papers, On being negative and The semantics of evaluational adjectives. We also gave presentations at conferences across the globe from February 2015 to June 2019, including Sydney in Australia, Albany in the United States, and here in Vancouver at a Canadian Linguistic Association meeting.

What broke your streak, so to speak?

Rada moved, first to the University of Novi Sad in Serbia, then to Belgrade University, and finally to HSE University in Moscow, Russia. It became quite difficult for us to work closely, so we planned to get together in Vancouver during 2020. I had also planned to collaborate with Cliff while spending a few months of study leave in Australia during 2021.

Then the pandemic hit, and all visits came to an abrupt halt. We had a paper underway, the result of our 2018 and 2019 conference publications. But we all became distracted with adapting to teaching our courses online rather than in-person, alongside various other responsibilities.

I cancelled my study leave, as visiting Australia during 2020 was of course impossible. Even in 2021, there were serious restrictions for non-citizens to enter Australia. It also became impossible to meet online, as we were on three different continents with time zone differences that simply didn’t line up.

We did a few meetings with just two of us at a time, but it was incredibly difficult to make progress.

How did you reach a turning point toward publication?

Finally, in 2023, we all decided that it was time to finish our research and submit it to a journal. I went to Australia in March 2023 for two weeks.

I took the opportunity to first visit a colleague, Professor Monika Bednarek, in Sydney. We organized a plan for her to visit SFU during Fall 2024, to deliver a colloquium on linguistic realism in TV dialogue and to collaborate on other research projects. (The projects that Monika and I discussed are now well underway, with my commentary on Monika’s position paper on topic modelling and a joint paper that has just been released online.)

Then, onward to my main goal. I travelled up the coast to visit Cliff in Brisbane. It was quite an experience to be in Queensland and to see Cliff in his home environment. I thoroughly enjoyed spending time there. I even got to feed kangaroos in a nature reserve in Brisbane, which was fantastic. While Cliff and I worked on the paper together in-person, Rada was able to meet with us virtually to collaborate. We succeeded in finishing the paper and getting it ready for submission.

Now, it has all come to fruition. At long last, our collaborative work interrupted by the pandemic is complete and out in the world. The twists and turns of research!