Recent & Upcoming Talks

We analysed several texts of Western Subanon and presented their results.

Using morphosyntax as a diagnostic tool for untangling the varied negative marking in Northwest Kainji.

Women of the u̱t‑Maꞌin community use a variety of languages in everyday life and in poetic performance. I present hypotheses about sociolinguistic dynamics that drive the use of particular languages in songs.

Building on existing corpora and new documentary fieldwork in West Africa, we are creating a multilingual comparative corpus. We present a technology toolkit and three parallel workflows that can be used to mobilize language materials for a variety of purposes, particularly for the discovery of discourse patterns in legacy materials.

A look at two constructions used for speech reporting in u̱t‑Maꞌin narrative texts and an overview of how the form of speech reporting constructions can extend beyond the bounds of the speech domain.

In this study I argue that the innovative suffix-marked nominative form is the result of reanalyzing a relative clause structure as main clause syntax. These clauses function are syntactically independent, and yet are somehow discourse dependent with limited occurrence in narrative texts.

The u̱t‑Maꞌin associative morpheme is in widespread use across different four distinct syntactic constructions. Understanding these diverse uses of the associative and the accompanying agreement marking is crucial to understanding the grammar of the language.

A presentation and defense of my Ph.D dissertation — Nominalization and predication in U̱t‑Maꞌin.

The morphological complexity of the U̱t‑Maꞌin noun class system holds the key to understanding the distinct elements of the two Progressive constructions.

A report on applying the principles of gamification to in-person data elicitation of Mòòré vocabulary.

Understanding the power that women hold in the preservation of underresourced languages.

A recent study (Nurse et al. 2010) surveyed Niger-Congo verbal categories. However, no data from Kainji languages was included quite …

u̱t‑Maꞌin verbs occur with suffixes that display one set of tense/direction distinctions. Other TAM designations are coded by auxiliaries. This is a first attempt at describing the range of meanings encoded on verbs.

Bibliography Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca (1994) Bybee, J., Perkins, R. & Pagliuca, W. (1994). The evolution of grammar: tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world. University of Chicago Press.

A presentation and defense of my MA thesis — The noun class system of u̱t‑Maꞌin, a West Kainji language of Northwestern Nigeria .

A first look at the u̱t-Ma’in noun class system: noun affixes and agreement morphology. Includes preliminary insight regarding semantic criteria that are active in the morphological system.

A presentation of preliminary research on the use of nominal forms in u̱t‑Maꞌin auxiliary constructions.