A Scholar's World

She works with the same faculty, frequents the same buildings and breathes the same air as students at the College. But Vicky Bergvall is in a world apart.

As a fourth-year Linguistics student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the makes a personal and academic commitment to her discipline for deeper than even the most studious undergraduates.

Yet in spite of her serious intellectual pursuits, Bergvall--like many of the students at Harvard's liberal arts graduate school--quickly shatters the stereotype of a quiet scholar-to-be poring over musty tomes day after day.

The 26-year-old from Montana begins a typical day at 6 a.m. with an invigorating run, and by 8:30 she is perched on the 12th floor of William James Hall, amidst a tangle of computer equipment she uses to anlayze Russian speech patterns.

Bergvall will spend the next two-and-a-half hours analyzing and cataloguing the inflections of certain Russian sentences--at the rate of about two or three sentences an hour. The tedious job is the "bit work" necessary for the development of a broader theory of the principles of spoken Russian, she explains. "It's not going to set the world on fire, but it's important to linguists," Bergvall adds.

She does complain, however, that this continuation of a summer research project takes precious time away from her own research, which is on Kikuyu, a language spoken by the natives of central Kenya. Involvement with faraway places is not something altogether new to Bergvall.

After graduating summa cum laude from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash. in 1978, she worked as a teller at a local bank and three months later parlayed her one college computer course into a job in the computer section the bank was forming. Less than a year later, she was asked to become head of the operation. But she decided to study linguistics at Harvard instead. "Four years of Walla Walla was all anyone could stand," she explains.

Her computer training has stood her in good stead at this eastern university, which dwarfs Whitman. Linguistics is becoming a science in the traditional sense, relying on quantitative data to prove its contentions, according to Bergvall "You cannot do linguistics today without some computer background," she says, adding that her own training of four years ago is already becoming dated. The program she is using to analyze intonation could not have been created five years ago, she adds.

At 11 a.m. Bergvall attends a course in modern African history that she is auditing. The class is fairly typical undergraduate survey lecture sprinkled with a few older students. Students take notes silently as the professor discusses the evolution of apartheid policies in South Africa.

Most fourth-year grad students take only highly specialized courses and research their theses--there is little time to indulge an intellectual whim. For Bergvall, though, this course provides the historical context for her own research in Kikuyu. She has, in fact, applied for a Fulbright grant to study the language in Kenya next year.

While eating lunch in her Science Center office, Bergvall polishes a presentation on "Women and Language" for a guest section she is to lead at 2 p.m. It is a topic that fascinates her, but one that "creates a lot of unease" among linguists, she says. So while she devotes her thesis to the analysis of Kikuyu, a traditional subject, she has made the issue of language and power between the sexes a second intellectual endeavor. It offers "a chance for me to express my feminism," she says, noting that academic pressures have forced her to sacrifice much of her earlier involvement with the University's Women's Center.

Three women attend the section, and all are initially skeptical that women use language much differently from men, citing their experience at Harvard. After a brief, informal and sometimes halting discussion, Vicky focuses on the issue of how conversations progress, and cites studies showing that men interrupt far more than women do. She contrasts the world of Harvard with her own background in rural Montana. By the end of the hour, the women have been gently hooked.

At 3 p.m., the linguistics graduate students gather in the departmental library for one of the two graduate seminars in which Bergvall is currently enrolled--phonetics. The course is designed to give the department's grad students an ear for using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a system including English and Greek symbols which can represent any of the approximately 100 sounds in human speech.

Every week, the students hear a foreign language, usually on tape and try to render its nuances in IPA. The featured language this week is Bergvall's specialty of Kikuyu, spoken by a native Kikuyu.

The students scatter for dinner, some heading to a concentrator's meeting at the Union, others going to more private haunts. But at 7:30 p.m., Bergvall is once more in the departmental library, this time to lead a review section on syntax for General Education 109; "Language and Human Nature." The previous night, she spent three hours working with a student on the fine points of Mohawk syntax. Tonight, though, it is only an hour, as the students ready for a midterm and have mostly technical questions.

Although this day's teaching load is particularly heavy (and larger than most graduate students'), Bergvall says she loves to teach and would ideally like to become a professor of linguistics. While there are far more jobs in fields such as "teaching" computers language, she says she doesn't want "to spend my life working with machines."

When she can do it, her own research involves the cataloguing of Kikuyu syntax, with the help of a native speaker. She also reads current theses on the syntax of related languages like Swahili, and works on her own framework for a Kikuyu syntax.

In her office after the class, Bergvall reflects on her experiences at the school. "The first year is hell," she says. It is "designed to make you really rethink your commitment," and to force you to immerse yourself in the mindset of your chosen field. After the initial strain, however, students begin to feel more comfortable with their department and the academic routine.

A more lasting sacrifice involves the lack of time for extracurricular activities, and the limited contact with people outside of the department. "The walls are sort of closing in," she says. She describes working at graduate school as a deferral of pleasure, of a social life, of anything other than "sleeping, eating and studying, not necessarily in that order."

But the intense focus has had its compensations too. With the help of her advisor she was able to publish a paper last year, and in January she completed another on women and language. She also mentions the pleasure of giving a good lecture and inspiring someone's interest in the topic. And even at the end of a 12-hour day, Bergvall seems committed to her goal. "Part of what I've been trying to do is to train myself for the life of the mind."