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Date & time: Tuesday, May 13th, 11:30am
Zoom link: Email lingcomm@sfu.ca  

About the speaker

is a Visiting Assistant Professor and Interim Director of the NAMA Program at . She recently completed her PhD here at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Linguistics. Schneider’s focus of research includes working with the Hul’q’umi’num’ people on description, analysis, and reclamation of their language. Hul’q’umi’num’ is the Vancouver Island dialect of Halkomelem Salish, which is one of the coastal languages of the Salish Sea region. Schneider is also currently learning more about the morphosyntax of a broader range of North American Indigenous languages. She recently presented at the Workshop on American Indigenous Languages (WAIL). 

Title

Corpus-informed syntax: Exploring Hul’q’umi’num’ serial verb constructions

Abstract 

In contexts where there exists a corpus of texts and a limited number of Elder speakers, a corpus-informed syntactic analysis approach enables linguists to use speaker’s time strategically. In this study, this method was used to investigate the word order in Hul’q’umi’num’ Salish serial verb constructions by comparing the results of elicited syntactic data with frequency counts from corpus data. While the results of the elicitation seemed to point to a very free word order, looking at the data through a discourse analysis lens revealed that only certain word orders are actually used by speakers. This approach accomplishes the following: (i) focuses research on the intersection between the interests of linguists and the interests of language communities, (ii) respects the fact that Elders’ may want to devote a majority of their time to reclamation, (iii) provides a clearer picture of the grammar than elicitation alone, and (iv) lays the groundwork for language learning materials that focus on useful components of the grammar.