Our third year graduate student Tory Sampson was awarded the best student stage presentation at the 13th triennial Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research (TISLR). Her presentation focused on the copular cycle in American Sign Language (ASL) with the sign, labeled as ‘SELF’. In this presentation, Tory presented three stages in the evolution of SELF – as a demonstrative pronoun in 1850’s French Sign Language (LSF – a predecessor of ASL), as a personal pronoun in 1910’s ASL, and finally as a copula in modern ASL. She also presented the ambiguous syntactic contexts that provided for the reinterpretation and subsequent grammaticalization of SELF. A video of her presentation can be found here.