Research & Projects
Qualifying Research Project
Vowel Spaces in Contact:
Ojibwe and English in Minnesota
Prior to candidacy I undertook an acoustic analysis of Ojibwe and English vowels using a corpus of radio audio from Minnesota Native News broadcasts.
Objectives
The goals were 1. to provide acoustic and sociophonetic description of Ojibwe as well as Minnesota English spoken by Ojibwe people, and 2. to examine contact effects when the two languages are spoken in contact.
Results
I found that speakers maintain unique vowel distinctions in English and Ojibwe, even when they do not fit the typical profile of a 'fluent' or 'L1' speaker. Further research is needed to evaluate the effects of contact, both synchronically and diachronically.
Ojibwe Classifier Project
I am involved in an ongoing collaboration with Prof. Cherry Meyer (University of Michigan) studying classifiers and medials in Ojibwe. These morphemes, found in the middle of verbs, vary widely in the kinds of information they encode.
We find that medials resist neat categorization into the conventional labels of 'classifier,' 'environmental medial,' 'body part medial,' and so on. We have suggested other measures for describing a medial, such as entity/quality semantics and the ability to combine with certain verb finals.