My interests include fieldwork, typology, morphology, communicative/information structure, cognitive linguistics, and Native American languages, particularly Salishan and the Northwest Coast Sprachbund. I am currently working on a project funded by the SSHRC to document Upper Necaxa Totonac, a previously undescribed language spoken in the Sierra Norte of Puebla State in Mexico. At present it has only around 3,400 speakers and is being learned with less and less frequency by children. Our aim is to produce a dictionary, grammatical sketch, and text collection in an effort to document and, hopefully, revitalize this seriously threatened language.
Publications on Totonac
(2009). with Yvonne Lam. Language loss and linguistic suicide: A case study from the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico. In Sarah Cummins, Brigit Janoski, and Patricia A. Shaw (eds.), All the Things You Are: A Festschrift for Jack Chambers, 5–16. Toronto: Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics.
(2008). Ideophones, adverbs, and predicate qualification in Upper Necaxa Totonac. International Journal of American Linguistics 74, 1–46. (Slideshow)
(2006). Control of agreement in multi-object constructions in Upper Necaxa Totonac. In Atsushi Fujimori & Maria Amelia Reis Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas. Vancouver: UBC Working Papers in Linguistics.
(2006). The emergence of ejective fricatives in Upper Necaxa Totonac. In Robert Kirchner (ed.), University of Alberta working papers in linguistics 1.
(2000). The syntax, semantics, and typology of adjectives in Upper Necaxa Totonac. Linguistic Typology 4, 213–250.
(2001). Primer vocabulario práctico del idioma totonaco del Río Necaxa. (First practical vocabulary of Upper Necaxa Totonac.) Edmonton: University of Alberta. (185pp)
(2003). Person-hierarchies and the origin of asymmetries in Totonac verbal paradigms. Linguistica Atlantica 23, 1–33.
(2004). A Grammatical Sketch of Upper Necaxa Totonac. LINCOM: Europa.
I am also working on a grammar of the Salishan language Lushootseed which I began under the guidance of the late Thom Hess, based on materials he collected. The language, which is nearly extinct, is one of the better documented languages in the family and has two good dictionaries as well as several excellent text collections, but relatively little grammatical work has been done beyond a pair of pedagogical grammars.
Publications on Salishan languages
(to appear). Communicative Structure in Lushootseed syntax: Thematicity and Focalization. In José Camacho, Rodrigo Gutiérrez-Bravo, and Liliana Sánchez (eds.), Information structure in languages of the Americas. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
(to appear). A taxonomy and typology of Lushootseed valency-increasing suffixes. International Journal of American Linguistics 75, 533–569.
(2009). Thematicity in Lushootseed syntax. In David Beck, Kim Gerdes, Jasmina Milićević, and Alain Polguère (eds.), Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Meaning-Text Theory, 55–64. Montreal: OLST.
(2007). with David Bennett. Extending the Prosodic Hierarchy: Evidence from Lushootseed narrative. Northwest Journal of Linguistics 1, 1–34.
(2000). Nominalization as complementation in Bella Coola and Lushootseed. In Kaoru Horie (ed.), Complementation: Cognitive and functional perspectives, 121–147. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
(2000). Unitariness of Participant and Event in the Bella Coola (Nuxalk) Middle Voice. International Journal of American Linguistics 66, 218–56.
(2000). Semantic agents, syntactic subjects, and discourse topics: How to locate Lushootseed sentences in space and time. Studies in Language 24:2, 277–317.
(1999). Words and prosodic phrasing in Lushootseed narrative. In T. Alan Hall & Ursula Kleinhenz (eds.), Studies on the Phonological Word, 23–46. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
(1997). Rheme, Theme, and communicative structure in Lushootseed and Bella Coola. In Leo Wanner (ed.), Recent in Meaning-Text Theory, 93–135. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
(1996). Transitivity and causation in Lushootseed morphology. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 41, 109–140.
My doctoral dissertation, The typology of parts-of-speech: The markedness of adjectives [New York: Routledge. 2002], lays the foundations of a theory of lexical classes, which at once accounts for the cross-linguistic markedness of adjectives and shows how parts of speech are a product of the interface between semantic and syntactic structures.
Publications on lexical classes
(2006). Review of Aikhenvald & Dixon, Adjective classes: A cross-linguistic typology. Functions of Language 13(1), 111–118.
(2005). Lexicalization of morphologically complex expressions. Presented at the 9th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea. (July 17–23)
(2004). Prototypical conceptual types and typological variation in parts-of-speech systems. Presented to the Conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Languages, University of Alberta.
(2003). Conceptual autonomy and the typology of parts of speech. In G. Casad & G. Palmer (eds.), Cognitive Linguistics and Non-Indo-European Languages: Studies in Cognitive Linguistics, 135–56. Berlin: Mouton.
(2000). Typological variation of the adjectival class: Markedness and iconicity at the semantics/syntax interface. Ms., University of Alberta.
My other interests include language contact, grammatical diffusion, and areal typology. I am particularly interested in the dynamics of grammatical diffusion found in a Sprachbund or residual zone, an area where large numbers of languages—frequently genetically unrelated or only distantly related to one another—have co-existed for centuries without wholesale language shift or replacement of local languages by a socio-economically more powerful neighbour.Publications on grammatical diffusion
(2002). Tsimshianic from a Central Northwest areal perspective: I. In S. Gessner & S. Oh (eds.), ICSNL XXXV: The 37th International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages, 35–60. Vancouver: UBC Working Papers in Linguistics.
(2000). Bella Coola and North Wakashan: Convergence and diversity in the Northwest Coast Sprachbund. D.G. Gilbers, J. Nerbonne, & J. Schaeken (eds.), Languages in Contact. Studies in Slavic and General Linguistics, Vol. 28, 37–53. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
(2000). Grammatical convergence and the genesis of diversity in the Northwest Coast Sprachbund. Anthropological Linguistics 42(2), 1–67.
(1997). Mosan III: A problem of remote common proximity. In Papers for the 32nd International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages, 22–46. Port Angeles, Washington.
In addition, I've put together a few pointers for students on formatting manuscripts and getting ready for conferences. These include tips on how to format interlinearized data and do things like in-text citations. Enjoy!