Research Statement

As a linguist, my research is inspired by an area interest in African languages & linguistics (including African varieties of English and codeswitching between English and African languages), an inclination for the fields of discourse analysis and language documentation, and a preference for corpus-based methods. My doctoral dissertation involved a broad-based study of register variation in Dagbani, a major language of northern Ghana, for which I compiled an annotated corpus of a variety of written and spoken texts and applied Douglas Biber’s Multi-Dimensional Analysis approach. I also drew on this corpus for further research and analysis of specific aspects of the Dagbani language (left dislocation, relative clause construction, and a comparison of discourse in Christian and Muslim sermons). I continue to draw on this data for additional research and documentation of this language.

More recently, I compiled an annotated corpus of chats by speakers of Hausa, the predominant language of northern Nigeria. While processing the corpus, I was struck by many Hausa speakers’ use of Hausa terms as equivalents for otherwise ubiquitous English “chat terms” like online, send (a file, etc.), and chat group, so my first application of the corpus was a systematic study of these bilingual speakers choices among Hausa and English chat terms. I’m currently working on a study of pragmatic markers in Hausa based on this corpus. I also plan to reinforce and compare this with spoken language data, facilitated by collection of radio program recordings for various African languages (including Hausa) that I carried out recently as an affiliate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Language Data Consortium (LDC).

As a native speaker of American English teaching in Nigeria and as someone with strong ties in Ghana, Kenya, and Cameroon, I have naturally developed an interest in African varieties of English. To begin with, I apply this interest as a teaching resource, engaging students in my linguistics classes with discussion questions and research topics involving awareness and study of distinctive aspects of phonology, lexicon, and grammar of Nigerian English. Furthermore, I am pursuing research in this field, including a somewhat unorthodox area: variation in punctuation. I also have a related pedagogical interest in how African varieties of English and discourse patterns in other African languages help account for common patterns found in students’ academic writing (i.e., errors or nonstandard forms). I have recently compiled a learner corpus, with the annotation being facilitated by a new grading methodology that allows me, in the course of assessing student essays, to simultaneously document error types and other targeted aspects of organization and expression in a relatively systematic and efficient manner. I am continuing analytical work on this corpus, and I have begun similar data collection with students from Afghanistan and look forward to comparing error patterns from different communities of students.

Among other areas of interest in African language documentation, I completed initial stages of planning projects with two different communities where endangered languages are associated with UNESCO World Heritage Sites. First, while working in Adamawa State in Nigeria, I met with leaders of Sukur Kingdom, home of a UNESCO World Heritage Cultural Landscape, which has fallen victim to Boko Haram attacks in recent years. The community benefitted from an endangered language documentation project for the Sakun language back in 2010-2011, inspiring a community interest in documentation and preservation of the Sakun language (which has an estimated 15,000 speakers). Though I am leaving Nigeria, I plan to remain in contact with the community and contribute towards rebuilding some resources that were lost due to Boko Haram attacks and moving forward with new or unfinished projects (dictionary building and a sociolinguistic study of language use in the market). Secondly, drawing on connections established during doctoral research in Ghana, I plan to work with the Kamara language community in Larabanga, Ghana (home of the Larabanga Mosque World Heritage Site, where the Kamara language has had very little documentation and where the number of native speakers may be as low as 3000). I have written up a research plan, but the project has been reserved for any year between 2021-2029 when the major cultural festival—the fire festival, which corresponds with the Day of Ashura on the Muslim calendar—falls during the summer break period.