Dene languages

Dene Sųłíné Documentation. Production of text collections, pedagogical grammar, bilingual dictionary, and analytical papers.

Tsuut’ina Documentation. Consultation with Tsuut’ina Gunaha Institute, training speakers and learners of Tsuut’ina in linguistics; delivered Community Linguist Certificate program to Tsuut’ina Nation participants in Winter 2009.

Dene Migration Project. Consortium of Dene peoples and academics from diverse interdisciplinary backgrounds investigating the path and time-course of the movement of Dene peoples across North America.

Dene Speech Atlas. Recording and analysis of the sound and intonation patterns of Dene speakers from communities of the Mackenzie Basin with Joyce McDonough.

Pan-Athapaskan Comparative Lexicon. Development of searchable and editable on-line database of basic vocabulary from published and contemporary sources.

corpus and cognitive linguistics

Inflectional islands. A large-scale study with John Newman tracking distributional skews for different inflected forms in paradigms.

Basic verbs. Ongoing investigation of the lexico-syntactic behavior of basic verbs across a variety of languages.

Dene Sųłíné corpus. XML corpus of published story collections (e.g. Goddard, Li & Scollon), transcriptions of recordings of speakers from a variety of communities, and contemporary written stories by speakers from Cold Lake, Alberta.

current graduate students and their research projects

Dana Abdulrahim (PhD student): A corpus-based analysis of the lexico-syntactic behavior of COME & GO verbs in Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, and colloquial dialects of Arabic (co-supervised with John Newman).

Dagmara Dowbor (PhD student): A corpus-based analysis of English caused motion constructions. (co-supervised with John Newman).

Doug Inglis (PhD student): Grammaticalization in Tai Khamti (co-supervised with John Newman).

Audra Phillips (PhD student): Verb serialization in Northern Pwo Karen.

Conor Snoek. (PhD student): Figurative lexicalization patterns in Athapaskan.

Dorothy Thunder. (MSc student): Development and analysis of a spoken corpus of Plains Cree.