Geographical Areas of Specialization: Northeastern
North America
Topical Interests: linguistic
theory and its application to the analysis of Native American languages,
comparative Algonquian linguistics, Maliseet-Passamaquoddy
Current Courses: L407/L600 Language and Prehistory
Profile:
The
founders of the Americanist tradition in anthropology, Franz Boas
and Edward Sapir, regarded linguistics as an essential part of their
discipline. Indeed, for much of the last century, anthropology departments
were the primary centers of linguistic research in this country.
With the rise of departments specifically devoted to linguistic
studies, however, the fields of linguistics and anthropology have
tended to diverge, and thus to lose track of the contributions that
each can make to the other. In my teaching, I seek to bridge this
gap, to show how an understanding of the nature of language can
contribute to our understanding other areas of culture, and to demonstrate
how research in cultural anthropology, archaeology, and physical
anthropology can provide essential insights for historical and analytical
work in linguistics. Since linguistic analysis can only be learned
by doing it, my courses place a strong emphasis on problem sets
that give students hands-on experience in analyzing linguistic data.
My
research focuses primarily on issues in the structure of languages
of the Algonquian family, the most widespread linguistic stock in
North America . My specialty within this domain is Maliseet-Passamaquoddy,
an Eastern Algonquian language spoken in New Brunswick (Maliseet)
and Maine (Passamaquoddy).
I
received my first introduction to the Maliseet-Passamaquoddy language
in the spring of 1975, when I attended a joint meeting of several
Micmac, Maliseet, and Passamaquoddy groups in Fredericton , New
Brunswick , a conference that was being held to discuss writing
systems for these languages to be used in several newly founded
bilingual education programs. Somehow I wound up spending a day
riding around Fredericton with a carload of Passamaquoddies from
Maine , who had decided to speak no English that day. While I understood
not a word that anyone was saying, I thought the language sounded
like music. (I would later learn that Maliseet-Passamaquoddy is
a pitch accent language: the "tunes" to which individual
words are "sung" do indeed play a fundamental role in
the language.) I was hooked.
I
began working with the language in the summer of 1976, when I was
hired by the Wabnaki Bilingual Education Program at Indian Township
, Me. , to organize a dictionary project. The project produced a
dictionary of a few thousand words that was published by the Micmac-Maliseet
Institute in Fredericton , N.B., in 1984. The work of that early
dictionary project is now being continued by a community-based project
at Pleasant Point , Me. , which has developed a dictionary data
base that is approaching 15,000 words.
http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/Maliseet/dictionary
My
recent work has involved editing a collection of Maliseet texts
recorded in 1963 by Karl V. Teeter of Harvard University, tales
told by elders most of whom were born before 1900, as well as various
older texts appearing in published and manuscript sources. I have
also been working on a series of projects in the syntax of Maliseet-Passamaquoddy
and looking into aspects of the phonology and syntax of another
Eastern Algonquian language, Western Abenaki.
Selected Publications:
| 2007 |
Tales from Maliseet Country: The Maliseet Texts of Karl
V. Teeter. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press |
| 2006 |
Movement, Wh-Agreement, and Apparent Wh-in-situ (With Chris
H. Reintges and Sandra Chung). In Wh-Movement: Moving On,
edited by Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng and Norbert Corver. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press |
| 2005 |
Traditions of Koluskap, the Culture Hero. In Algonquian
Spirit: Contemporary Translations of the Angonquian Literatures
of North America, edited by Brian Swann, 99-111. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press |
| 2004 |
The Internal Structure of the Noun Phrase in Maliseet-Passamaquoddy.
In Papers of the Thirty-Fifth Algonquian Conference, edited
by H.C. Wolfart, 239-63. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba |
| 2004 |
The
Legendary Tom Laporte: A Maliseet Tradition. In Voices
from Four Directions: Contemporary Translations of the Native
Literatures of North America , edited by Brian Swann,
546-60. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press. |
| 2003 |
The
Noun Substitute in Maliseet-Passamaquoddy. In Essays in
Algonquian and Siouan Linguistics in Memory of Frank T. Siebert,
Jr. , edited by Blair A. Rudes and David C. Costa, 141-63.
Winnipeg : University of Manitoba Press. |
| 2003 |
Reflexes
of Proto-Algonquian *wi:la 'he, she'
= in Maliseet-Passamaquoddy. International Journal of American
Linguistics 69:357-69, 2003. |
| 1997 |
Ackerman, Farrell, and Philip
S. LeSourd. (1997) Toward a Lexical Representation of Phrasal
Predicates (with Farrell Ackerman). In Complex
Predicates , edited by Alex Alsina, Joan Bresnan, and Peter
Sells, 67-106. Stanford , Calif. : CSLI Publications
|
| 1995 |
Diminutive
Verb Forms in Passamaquoddy. International Journal of
American Linguistics 61:103-34. |
| 1993 |
Accent
and Syllable Structure in Passamaquoddy. New
York : Garland . |
| 1984 |
Kolusuwakonol:
Peskotomuhkati-Wolastoqewi Naka Ikolisomani Latuwewakon/Philip
S. LeSourd's English and Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Dictionary.
Fredericton , N.B.: Micmac-Maliseet Institute.
|
