Sociolinguistics
- Himalayan Languages in the Linguistic Landscape of Jackson Heights (Second Qualifying Examination, The Graduate Center, CUNY, 2023. Advisor: Cecelia Cutler).
- Photographic examination of Linguistic Landscape (LL) tokens of Jackson Heights; analyzing “visible” language usage in public spaces. Focus on Himalayan languages of Tibet and the Indian subcontinent and their relative prevalence in the neighborhood LL compared to English and Spanish.
- Discusses the spatial organization of select LL tokens by drawing upon previous semiotic approaches making distinctions between “communicative” and “symbolic” language usage, as well as Kress and van Leeuwen’s grammar for representing dimensions of visual space.
- ATLAS.ti is used to code the images according to the languages present on the signs, how the languages on multilingual signs are arranged in the available space, textual genre (billboard, subway signage, advertisement, shop sign, etc.), and origin (top-down vs. bottom-up).
- A quantitative analysis is performed using ATLAS.ti correlating the occurrence of languages with defined semiotic codes to uncover how they are distributed within the LL and how this reflects the linguistic norms of the neighborhood.
Language Documentation
Fall 2022
- Collected data on the Ekhwa dialect of the Adara language, an understudied Niger-Congo language of Nigeria.
- Led several elicitation sessions in Field Methods class and weekly small group meetings outside of class, working with a speaker of Adara to describe the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the language.
- Transcribed recordings using Praat and presented linguistic analyses in the form of phonological and morphosyntactic sketches.
Data collected from this project was contributed to the following presentation:
Amaris, Josh, Emmanuel Bawa, Jason Kandybowicz, Zhilang Liu, Aidan Malanoski, Margaret Matte, Olivia Mignone, Anne Nguyen, Shane Quinn, & Alaa Sharif. June 14, 2023. Question formation in Adara. Annual Conference on African Linguistics 54, University of Connecticut. handout
Phonology
- Glottal stop epenthesis as a hiatus resolution processes in Ainu: evidence from acoustic analysis (First Qualifying Examination, The Graduate Center, CUNY, 2021. Advisor: Juliette Blevins).
- Acoustic investigation of VV sequences in Ainu across different prosodic contexts using Praat software.
- Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David (2021). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 6.1.52, retrieved 25 August 2021 from http://www.praat.org/
- Analyzed recordings from A Glossed Audio Corpus of Ainu Folklore
- Nakagawa, Hiroshi; Bugaeva, Anna; Kobayashi, Miki and Yoshimi, Yoshikawa (2016-2021) A Glossed Audio Corpus of Ainu Folklore. NINJAL. Available from https://ainu.ninjal.ac.jp/folklore/
- Acoustic investigation of VV sequences in Ainu across different prosodic contexts using Praat software.
- Rendaku: A multi-strata investigation of its triggers and blockers using an OT framework (MA thesis, Stony Brook University, 2017. Advisor: Lori Repetti).
- Assuming a morphophonological nature of rendaku (Japanese sequential voicing), argues that factors which on the surface do not appear to be phonological can be accounted for within an OT model.
- Discusses the lexical stratification of the Japanese language and the sensitivity of rendaku to morpheme origin (native Japanese, Sino-Japanese, or foreign loan).
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