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
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 an afternoon 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. That early dictionary work was continued by a community-based project at Pleasant Point, ME, which has developed a dictionary database with over 16,500 entries, many with sound files, available on line at www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/Maliseet/dictionary. In 2007, Peskotomuhkati Wolastoqewi Lautuwewakon / A Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Dictionary was published (Orono, ME: University of Maine Press), with more than 18,000 entries.
More recently, I have been involved in editing Maliseet and Passamaquoddy texts. For one project, I transcribed and translated a collection of material that was tape-recorded in New Brunswick in 1963 by Karl V. Teeter of Harvard University, which includes tales told by a number of elders who were born before 1900. For another project, I am investigating nineteenth century religious texts in Passamaquoddy and its neighbor to the southwest, Penobscot. I am also working on several areas of the syntax of Maliseet-Passamaquoddy and taking a look at aspects of the structure of another related language, Western Abenaki.
| 2011 |
On Split Coordination in Passamaquoddy. In Papers of the Forty-First Algonquian Conference, edited by Karl S. Hele. London, Ont.: University of Western Ontario. |
| 2010 |
On Raising to Object in Maliseet-Passamaquoddy. In Proceedings of WSCLA 14: The Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas, edited by Heather Bliss and Amelia Reis Silva. University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics 26. Vancouver: Department of Linguistics, University of British Columbia. |
| 2009 |
How to Swear in Maliseet-Passamaquoddy and Penobscot (with Conor McDonough Quinn). Anthropological Linguistics 51:1-38. |
| 2009 |
On the Analytic Expression of Predicates in Meskwaki. In Hypothesis A / Hypothesis B: Linguistic Explorations in Honor of David M. Perlmutter, edited by Donna B. Gerdts, John C. Moore, and Maria Polinsky, 247-74. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. |
| 2007 |
Tales from Maliseet Country: The Maliseet Texts of Karl V. Teeter. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. |
| 2006 |
Problems for the Pronominal Argument Hypothesis in Maliseet-Passamaquoddy. Language 82:486-514. |
| 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, 165-94. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. |
| 2005 |
Traditions of Koluskap, the Culture Hero. In Algonquian Spirit: Contemporary Translations of the Algonquian Literatures of North America, edited by Brian Swann, 99-111. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
Student Building 130, 701 E. Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47405-7100 | Phone: (812) 855-1041 | Fax: (812) 855-4358 |
anthro@indiana.edu