Jhesper Kloyd Valdez, a USM Student, Brings Honor as Lone Filipino Recipient of 2025 Dr. McKenzie Scholarship
October 27, 2025
USM Physics Student Earns Best Oral Presenter Award at International Conference
October 27, 2025
Dr. Rowena V. Sosas, Director for Quality Assurance and a Faculty member of the College of Education, Arts and Sciences of the USM-Kidapawan City Campus (USM-KCC) presented research findings on the “Morphophonemics of the Cebuano Language in Kidapawan City” during the 16th Free Linguistics International Conference at the University of Santo Tomas (UST), Manila on October 23-25, 2025.
In her presentation, she highlighted that the study revealed that Cebuanos form new words in many creative ways—by adding affixes, using proper names, repeating or combining words, shortening or blending terms, borrowing from other languages, inventing new roots, and softening harsh expressions. It also showed that the Cebuano language changes sounds through processes like assimilation, dissimilation, deletion, epenthesis, and metathesis, proving that while languages follow rules, they continue to evolve and adapt over time.
Moreover, Dr. Sosas also joined a training workshop on Forensic Linguistics, where she gained foundational knowledge and hands-on experience through real case analyses. The workshop explored key topics such as police interviews, courtroom discourse, and authorship analysis. Beyond research, she actively participated in designing credible community projects that promote social impact and linguistic awareness. Series of trainings include Dr. Leslie Barratt, Professor Emerita of Linguistics from Indiana State University, who leads a workshop entitled “Engaging and Challenging All of Your Students.“
During the conference, renowned linguists and scholars from local and international institutions shared their expertise through a series of lectures and workshops covering diverse areas of linguistics. Topics ranged from designing credible community projects and analyzing Filipino discourse to forensic linguistics, research proposal writing, and corpus-based methods. The sessions were led by experts from institutions such as the University of Sydney, Ateneo de Manila University, University of Santo Tomas, Philippine Normal University, Universiti Malaya, and De La Salle University, enriching participants with both theoretical insights and practical applications in the field.
The main conference commenced on Oct. 24, 2025 with parallel sessions facilitating the presentations of various research findings in language and linguistics.
Photo credit to: FLC 2025 and University of Santo Tomas
