You're doing linguistics? I'm a linguistics major too, we just finished historical ling this semester. What languages are you looking at?
I only had a cognitive linguistics unit in first year, and it mostly focused on child aquisition, but goddamn was it interesting. What are you doing for your phD?
I study how people process multiword expressions! My undergrad thesis was on whether people represent multiword expressions holistically or whether they are only built up compositionally during processing. My data suggested that people store highly frequent multiword expressions as holistic units. Now I'm looking at a couple of related aspects, like whether the frequency of a multiword expression influences how people process the individual words inside it. For my dissertation though, I think I'm leaning towards doing some more mechanistic stuff, like how do people establish representations of multiword expressions in the first place? How do we know which information will be useful and which information to discard? etc.
Whoah, whoah. You've made some assumptions of me. I'm kinda a language hobbyist, I've never studied it. I made a bare-bones phonology and a set of words for a proto-language and I'm putting sound changes to it and fucking around with it to see where it all ends up. No linguistics major buddies (at least not for a long while yet), sorry. EDIT: Basically I conlang for fun. That sums it up.
Aw damn :/ That's still really really cool though, sounds like you're building a language?
My plan right now is to get a nice big pretty language-family chain going after all these sound changes, then maybe filling them out with... pretty much anything beyond the very surface. I want to finish looking up and figuring out sound change first.
Could be worth looking a little a morphology, and creating some basic morphemes as well