Workshop on Athabaskan Prosody:
Tone, stress, tone-stress
interaction, prosody-morphology interaction
Friday, June 9, 2000
Funding
We are happy to announce that funding for major workshop
expenses will be provided by a SSHRC (Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council) grant to UNBC, awarded to Antonia
Mills, Sharon Hargus and Margaret Anderson.
Why a workshop on prosody?
Lately there has been a flurry of work on Athabaskan prosody,
particularly on stress. However, there has been no organized
communication among researchers with regard to appropriate
methodologies or research results. The workshop is designed to
help linguists better inform themselves of results on the
languages of this family.
Invited speakers include:
- Jeff Leer, Associate Prof., University of Alaska
Fairbanks, is currently working on tone in Sarcee,
Tlingit, and on issues of tonal development in the
Athapaskan language family as a whole. His presentation
at the workshop will most likely be on issues relating to
stress, historical phonological development, and the
notion ‘stem’ in Athabaskan linguistics.
- Siri Tuttle, Post-Doctoral Scholar, University of
California Los Angeles, has worked on the prosodic
systems of more Athapaskan languages than any other
schoar: Tolowa, Tanana (Minto and Salcha dialects). She
is currently instrumentally investigating these issues in
Apachean (White Mountain and Jicarilla), in collaborative
efforts with Willem de Reuse and Melissa Axelrod.
- John Alderete, Post-Doctoral Scholar, University of
British Columbia is currently working on Tahltan prosody
in collaboration with Tanya Bob.
- Bill Poser, Carrier-Sekani Tribal Council Education
Coordinator and adjunct professor, UBC, is developing a
theory of tone in which the prosodic systems of languages
like Carrier (Athapaskan) play an important role.
- Tanya Bob, post-MA student at UBC and member of the
Tahltan community, recently (1999) filed an M.A. thesis
entitled "Laryngeal Phenomena in Tahltan". She
is also investigating prosodic issues in Tahltan.
- Suzanne Gessner, post-MA student at UBC, also recently
completed a MA thesis entitled "Laryngeal processes
in Chipewyan and other Athapaskan languages." She is
currently working on causative constructions in Carrier.