Finding effective ways to bolster the relationship between linguistic documentation and language ... more Finding effective ways to bolster the relationship between linguistic documentation and language revitalization and pedagogy is important for endangered languages, especially severely threatened ones. We propose a model where documentation and analysis feed into revitalization and training, extrapolating from experiences with pronunciation training for Chickasaw learners. This research is important because for many languages, the phonological aspects are often underdocumented and teacher training may omit phonetics and phonology. Sounding 'native'-like in pronunciation is often a goal in instruction and learning for endangered language. This goal can be furthered by attention to phonology in both documentation and revitalization. The Chickasaw language is estimated to have 65 or fewer fluent speakers, all over the age of 60, and a core group of four to five proficient second language learners. The Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program utilizes fluent speakers by drawing ...
this paper, we will see an example of a novel "rhythm rule", novel both empirically and... more this paper, we will see an example of a novel "rhythm rule", novel both empirically and theoretically. The pattern of destressing occurs in Tohono O'odham, and the data reflects fieldwork by the author. Tohono O'odham (formerly known as Papago) is a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in southern Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. O'odham destresses primary stresses in words preceded by a stressed clitic.
The Uto-Aztecan language, Tohono O’odham (formerly Papago), has very free word order, along with ... more The Uto-Aztecan language, Tohono O’odham (formerly Papago), has very free word order, along with a systematic requirement that the auxiliary should surface in second position. The contexts in which this requirement is suspended are argued to open a crucial window on its nature. The chapter contends that prosody and morphophonological considerations that determine the auxiliary placement reflect preferences for consonant-initial and trochaic patterns at the beginnings of clauses. Evidence comes from a class of vowel-initial particles that robustly resist moving to clause-initial position, and the so- called g-determiner, which otherwise occurs with all nouns, including proper nouns, in all other positions is barred where a noun surfaces in clause-initial position. The analysis of prefixed auxiliaries as second position can also be called into question, as they arguably fill the first position and first syllable of the clause. This, then, may be a genuine case of a phonologically cond...
In the years since the alarm was raised by linguists (Hale et al. 1992) regarding the survival of... more In the years since the alarm was raised by linguists (Hale et al. 1992) regarding the survival of many of the world’s estimated 7,000 languages, many programs have developed to support language maintenance and revitalization. These programs have been situated in both academic and tribal/grassroots institutions. After at least three decades of such programs, it is clear that many of these programs do not survive. In this paper, I outline the essential properties of successful and sustainable approaches, in part drawing from my own work at the University of Texas at Arlington’s Native American Languages Lab. In analyzing the components of a sustainable model, I focus on collaborations primarily in the United States, in Texas and Oklahoma. This case study thus presents one exemplar of how community-based research operates in a larger regional context. This makes the case that long-term capacity building and training is essential. * This material is based upon work supported by, and con...
ABSTRACT Service-learning integrates community service into a credit-earning course to enrich the... more ABSTRACT Service-learning integrates community service into a credit-earning course to enrich the learning experience and pair practice with theory in some content area. Linguistics courses offer tremendous potential for service-learning because there are a variety of ways in which language-related theory can be put into practice. This paper outlines the development of a service-learning curriculum for linguistics courses. While examples come from a project where students tutored adult second language learners of English, the activities in this paper extend well to other linguistics courses. Reflection is essential to service-learning, so necessary background and examples of it as a structured learning tool appear here. A second assessment tool, an anonymous online survey taken before and after tutoring, was used to explore any impact on language and diversity attitudes. More generally, service-learning has the potential to positively affect career development, to generate a sense of civic engagement, to facilitate greater understanding of other cultures and races and to make a difference in local communities.
The phonology of Tigrinya has received considerable attention, in both descriptive and theoretica... more The phonology of Tigrinya has received considerable attention, in both descriptive and theoretical terms. This paper contributes to that literature by presenting facts from a rural dialect of Tigrinya; the dialect is spoken in the village Kerkos, just outside of Mekele. This paper focuses on the distribution of bilabial and velar stops and fricatives, those segments that have been observed to participate in spirantization. The dialect reveals a pattern unlike those previously documented for other Tigrinya dialects.
Tohono O'odham (formerly Papago) assigns primary stress to the first syllable in content word... more Tohono O'odham (formerly Papago) assigns primary stress to the first syllable in content words; but there is an asymmetry in the distribution of secondary stress, where the facts are more complicated. Polymorphemic words stress all odd syllables, whereas monomorphemic words stress only nonfinal odd syllables. The implications of this distribution for metrical stress theory are discussed. It is especially intriguing that the crucial support for the asymmetry comes exclusively from loanwords.
While data collection early in the Americanist tradition included texts as part of the Boasian tr... more While data collection early in the Americanist tradition included texts as part of the Boasian triad, later developments in the generative traditionmoved away from narratives. With a resurgence of attention to texts in both linguistic theory and language documentation, the literature on methodologies is growing (i.e., Chelliah 2001, Chafe 1980, Burton & Matthewson 2015). We outline our approach to collecting Chickasaw texts in what we call a ‘narrative bootcamp.’ Chickasaw is a severely threatened language and no longer in common daily use. Facilitating narrative collection with elder fluent speakers is an important goal, as is the cultivation of second language speakers and the training of linguists and tribal language professionals. Our bootcamps meet these goals. Moreover, we show many positive outcomes to this approach, including a positive sense of language use and ‘fun’ voiced by the elders, the corpus expansion that occurs by collecting and processing narratives onsite in the...
Paper presented at the Twenty-Eighth Western Conference On Linguistics (WECOL99) held at the Univ... more Paper presented at the Twenty-Eighth Western Conference On Linguistics (WECOL99) held at the University of Texas - El Paso October 29-31, 1999
While grassroots organizations like the American Indian Language Development Institute have long ... more While grassroots organizations like the American Indian Language Development Institute have long shown the importance of training to indigenous language communities, an increasing emphasis on training in language documentation and revitalization is emerging in new funding initiatives and training institutes and consortia world-wide. In this current atmosphere, the 2012 Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshop presents a case study in training in which the goals of training indigenous community members and graduate students can take place simultaneously. With the rising prominence of training models in language documentation and revitalization, and the practical dimension faced by limitations on resources like personnel and funding, the importance of satisfying multiple goals in a single training venue cannot be underestimated. Three factors underlie the successes of the 2012 OKBOL: team selection process; mentoring; final day activities and reflection. First, the team selection process made...
For language documentation to be sufficiently extensive to cover a given community’s language pra... more For language documentation to be sufficiently extensive to cover a given community’s language practices (cf. Himmelmann 1998), then including verbal arts is essential to ensure the richness of that comprehensive record. The verbal arts span the creative and artistic uses of a given language by speakers, such as storytelling, songs, puns and poetry. In this paper, I demonstrate the significance of verbal arts documentation in three other ways. Drawing from Indigenous language community contexts in the United States, I describe how the verbal arts are relevant to linguistic theory, revitalization and training. First, the influence by verbal arts on phonological theory is attested, affirming that the collection and analysis of verbal arts data plays a significant role in the phonological analysis of a given language and in theories of phonology. Second, the verbal arts generate extremely useful examples in training models for language work, since such examples can be used to cultivate ...
Here we present research resulting from a tribal-academic collaboration between the Chickasaw Lan... more Here we present research resulting from a tribal-academic collaboration between the Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program (CLRP) and the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). This collaboration began three years ago, with a UTA service-learning trip to Ada, Oklahoma. The Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program is vigorously engaged in many activities to support language use by the remaining 70 or so fluent speakers. Communities facing such stark endangerment must address revitalization and documentation simultaneously, and in a way that maximizes resources. Our partnership addresses this challenge. This paper draws on the principles of Community-Based Language Research, defined in Czaykowska-Higgins (2009: 24) as a model that “not only allows for the production of knowledge on a language, but also assumes that that knowledge can and should be constructed for, with, and by community members, and that it is therefore not merely (or primarily) for or by linguists.” Benefitting ...
Finding effective ways to bolster the relationship between linguistic documentation and language ... more Finding effective ways to bolster the relationship between linguistic documentation and language revitalization and pedagogy is important for endangered languages, especially severely threatened ones. We propose a model where documentation and analysis feed into revitalization and training, extrapolating from experiences with pronunciation training for Chickasaw learners. This research is important because for many languages, the phonological aspects are often underdocumented and teacher training may omit phonetics and phonology. Sounding 'native'-like in pronunciation is often a goal in instruction and learning for endangered language. This goal can be furthered by attention to phonology in both documentation and revitalization. The Chickasaw language is estimated to have 65 or fewer fluent speakers, all over the age of 60, and a core group of four to five proficient second language learners. The Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program utilizes fluent speakers by drawing ...
this paper, we will see an example of a novel "rhythm rule", novel both empirically and... more this paper, we will see an example of a novel "rhythm rule", novel both empirically and theoretically. The pattern of destressing occurs in Tohono O'odham, and the data reflects fieldwork by the author. Tohono O'odham (formerly known as Papago) is a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in southern Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. O'odham destresses primary stresses in words preceded by a stressed clitic.
The Uto-Aztecan language, Tohono O’odham (formerly Papago), has very free word order, along with ... more The Uto-Aztecan language, Tohono O’odham (formerly Papago), has very free word order, along with a systematic requirement that the auxiliary should surface in second position. The contexts in which this requirement is suspended are argued to open a crucial window on its nature. The chapter contends that prosody and morphophonological considerations that determine the auxiliary placement reflect preferences for consonant-initial and trochaic patterns at the beginnings of clauses. Evidence comes from a class of vowel-initial particles that robustly resist moving to clause-initial position, and the so- called g-determiner, which otherwise occurs with all nouns, including proper nouns, in all other positions is barred where a noun surfaces in clause-initial position. The analysis of prefixed auxiliaries as second position can also be called into question, as they arguably fill the first position and first syllable of the clause. This, then, may be a genuine case of a phonologically cond...
In the years since the alarm was raised by linguists (Hale et al. 1992) regarding the survival of... more In the years since the alarm was raised by linguists (Hale et al. 1992) regarding the survival of many of the world’s estimated 7,000 languages, many programs have developed to support language maintenance and revitalization. These programs have been situated in both academic and tribal/grassroots institutions. After at least three decades of such programs, it is clear that many of these programs do not survive. In this paper, I outline the essential properties of successful and sustainable approaches, in part drawing from my own work at the University of Texas at Arlington’s Native American Languages Lab. In analyzing the components of a sustainable model, I focus on collaborations primarily in the United States, in Texas and Oklahoma. This case study thus presents one exemplar of how community-based research operates in a larger regional context. This makes the case that long-term capacity building and training is essential. * This material is based upon work supported by, and con...
ABSTRACT Service-learning integrates community service into a credit-earning course to enrich the... more ABSTRACT Service-learning integrates community service into a credit-earning course to enrich the learning experience and pair practice with theory in some content area. Linguistics courses offer tremendous potential for service-learning because there are a variety of ways in which language-related theory can be put into practice. This paper outlines the development of a service-learning curriculum for linguistics courses. While examples come from a project where students tutored adult second language learners of English, the activities in this paper extend well to other linguistics courses. Reflection is essential to service-learning, so necessary background and examples of it as a structured learning tool appear here. A second assessment tool, an anonymous online survey taken before and after tutoring, was used to explore any impact on language and diversity attitudes. More generally, service-learning has the potential to positively affect career development, to generate a sense of civic engagement, to facilitate greater understanding of other cultures and races and to make a difference in local communities.
The phonology of Tigrinya has received considerable attention, in both descriptive and theoretica... more The phonology of Tigrinya has received considerable attention, in both descriptive and theoretical terms. This paper contributes to that literature by presenting facts from a rural dialect of Tigrinya; the dialect is spoken in the village Kerkos, just outside of Mekele. This paper focuses on the distribution of bilabial and velar stops and fricatives, those segments that have been observed to participate in spirantization. The dialect reveals a pattern unlike those previously documented for other Tigrinya dialects.
Tohono O'odham (formerly Papago) assigns primary stress to the first syllable in content word... more Tohono O'odham (formerly Papago) assigns primary stress to the first syllable in content words; but there is an asymmetry in the distribution of secondary stress, where the facts are more complicated. Polymorphemic words stress all odd syllables, whereas monomorphemic words stress only nonfinal odd syllables. The implications of this distribution for metrical stress theory are discussed. It is especially intriguing that the crucial support for the asymmetry comes exclusively from loanwords.
While data collection early in the Americanist tradition included texts as part of the Boasian tr... more While data collection early in the Americanist tradition included texts as part of the Boasian triad, later developments in the generative traditionmoved away from narratives. With a resurgence of attention to texts in both linguistic theory and language documentation, the literature on methodologies is growing (i.e., Chelliah 2001, Chafe 1980, Burton & Matthewson 2015). We outline our approach to collecting Chickasaw texts in what we call a ‘narrative bootcamp.’ Chickasaw is a severely threatened language and no longer in common daily use. Facilitating narrative collection with elder fluent speakers is an important goal, as is the cultivation of second language speakers and the training of linguists and tribal language professionals. Our bootcamps meet these goals. Moreover, we show many positive outcomes to this approach, including a positive sense of language use and ‘fun’ voiced by the elders, the corpus expansion that occurs by collecting and processing narratives onsite in the...
Paper presented at the Twenty-Eighth Western Conference On Linguistics (WECOL99) held at the Univ... more Paper presented at the Twenty-Eighth Western Conference On Linguistics (WECOL99) held at the University of Texas - El Paso October 29-31, 1999
While grassroots organizations like the American Indian Language Development Institute have long ... more While grassroots organizations like the American Indian Language Development Institute have long shown the importance of training to indigenous language communities, an increasing emphasis on training in language documentation and revitalization is emerging in new funding initiatives and training institutes and consortia world-wide. In this current atmosphere, the 2012 Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshop presents a case study in training in which the goals of training indigenous community members and graduate students can take place simultaneously. With the rising prominence of training models in language documentation and revitalization, and the practical dimension faced by limitations on resources like personnel and funding, the importance of satisfying multiple goals in a single training venue cannot be underestimated. Three factors underlie the successes of the 2012 OKBOL: team selection process; mentoring; final day activities and reflection. First, the team selection process made...
For language documentation to be sufficiently extensive to cover a given community’s language pra... more For language documentation to be sufficiently extensive to cover a given community’s language practices (cf. Himmelmann 1998), then including verbal arts is essential to ensure the richness of that comprehensive record. The verbal arts span the creative and artistic uses of a given language by speakers, such as storytelling, songs, puns and poetry. In this paper, I demonstrate the significance of verbal arts documentation in three other ways. Drawing from Indigenous language community contexts in the United States, I describe how the verbal arts are relevant to linguistic theory, revitalization and training. First, the influence by verbal arts on phonological theory is attested, affirming that the collection and analysis of verbal arts data plays a significant role in the phonological analysis of a given language and in theories of phonology. Second, the verbal arts generate extremely useful examples in training models for language work, since such examples can be used to cultivate ...
Here we present research resulting from a tribal-academic collaboration between the Chickasaw Lan... more Here we present research resulting from a tribal-academic collaboration between the Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program (CLRP) and the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). This collaboration began three years ago, with a UTA service-learning trip to Ada, Oklahoma. The Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program is vigorously engaged in many activities to support language use by the remaining 70 or so fluent speakers. Communities facing such stark endangerment must address revitalization and documentation simultaneously, and in a way that maximizes resources. Our partnership addresses this challenge. This paper draws on the principles of Community-Based Language Research, defined in Czaykowska-Higgins (2009: 24) as a model that “not only allows for the production of knowledge on a language, but also assumes that that knowledge can and should be constructed for, with, and by community members, and that it is therefore not merely (or primarily) for or by linguists.” Benefitting ...
A chapter appearing in 2017 in Perspectives on Language and Linguistics: Community-Based Research... more A chapter appearing in 2017 in Perspectives on Language and Linguistics: Community-Based Research
In this chapter, I will focus on collaborative work done in conjunction with UT Arlington’s Native American Languages Lab and with our partners. These projects thus serve as a training-oriented case study, which I use to make several key claims about models of community-based language research. From this case study, I make the following claims. First, work in the Oklahoma region shows itself as a sustainable model that has endured over a relatively long time period as far as language revitalization is concerned. Second, that this sustainability is possible when training includes certain fundamental properties (outlined further below) and when training is characterizable in terms that I describe as polyhedral, dynamic, decentered in authority and complex. I further argue that where there are sustainable, effective models of endangered language research, these models thrive because they critically blur the distinction between revitalization and documentation. Finally, despite not being explicitly community-driven (at least in its current incarnation), I demonstrate that this case study exemplifies one instantiation of a community-based language research model.
For language documentation to be sufficiently extensive to cover a given community's language pra... more For language documentation to be sufficiently extensive to cover a given community's language practices (cf. Himmelmann 1998), then including verbal arts is essential to ensure the richness of that comprehensive record. The verbal arts span the creative and artistic uses of a given language by speakers, such as storytelling, songs, puns and poetry. In this paper, I demonstrate the significance of verbal arts documentation in three other ways. Drawing from indigenous language community contexts in the United States, I describe how the verbal arts are relevant to linguistic theory, revitalization and training. First, the influence by verbal arts on phonological theory is attested, affirming that the collection and analysis of verbal arts data plays a significant role in the phonological analysis of a given language and in theories of phonology. Second, the verbal arts generate extremely useful examples in training models for language work, since such examples can be used to cultivate phonological awareness in learners and teachers. Third, the verbal arts provide culturally meaningful materials for language revitalization.
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Papers by Colleen Fitzgerald
In this chapter, I will focus on collaborative work done in conjunction with UT Arlington’s Native American Languages Lab and with our partners. These projects thus serve as a training-oriented case study, which I use to make several key claims about models of community-based language research. From this case study, I make the following claims. First, work in the Oklahoma region shows itself as a sustainable model that has endured over a relatively long time period as far as language revitalization is concerned. Second, that this sustainability is possible when training includes certain fundamental properties (outlined further below) and when training is characterizable in terms that I describe as polyhedral, dynamic, decentered in authority and complex. I further argue that where there are sustainable, effective models of endangered language research, these models thrive because they critically blur the distinction between revitalization and documentation. Finally, despite not being explicitly community-driven (at least in its current incarnation), I demonstrate that this case study exemplifies one instantiation of a community-based language research model.