Fieldwork

My fieldwork to date has been with the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. The Yellowknives Dene are a traditionally bilingual community, speaking both Tlicho Yatiì (Dogrib) and Dëne Suliné (Chipewyan). In addition, some people are able to understand, or have some proficiency in, Slavey, Gwich’in, Inuktitut, and/or Cree. Though remarkable at first glance, such multilingualism was actually the norm in most of the world before the rise of nation-states, and was especially true of North America before European settlement (Golla 2000, Rice 2004).

My dissertation fieldwork consists of two stages: January to May of 2008, and April to July of 2009. The title of my dissertation is "Morphological Typology and the Athabaskan Verb," which, as the title suggests, has two main components: collecting detailed morphophonemic data on Athabaskan verb forms, and developing a formal model in which important descriptive insights can be stated precisely. At present, morphological typology plays almost no role in formal generative theories; morphological type is considered an epiphenomenon the interplay of phonology, syntax, and diachronic change, and morphological systems are thought to have no autonomous properties (Anderson 1990, 1992). I on the other hand take the position that morphology is no different from other domains of grammar: we expect to find in morphology markedness hierarchies, implicational universals, and emergence-of-the-unmarked effects, just as in phonology and syntax.

Specifically, I claim that the traditional 19th-century typological categories--Isolating, Agglutinating, and Fusional--are not epiphenomenal, but follow from a small set of constraints, and the different attested types can be derived by factorial typology in OT. At the theoretical level, the biggest challenge is to develop a precise characterization of notions such as "contrastive" or "fused," which can be implemented with mathematical precision. At the empirical level, most of the work is simply collecting a large enough corpus of verb paradigms (both through text-collection and traditional elicitation), and doing phonetic analysis on it.

Yellowknife is a very, very beautiful place and I can’t wait to go back! (San Francisco is so boring—it hardly ever snows here).