Fieldwork

Kwa (Potou): Atchan and Nghlwa

Atchan (ISO: ebr) and Nghlwa (ISO: gwa) are the two languages which make up the Potou branch of the Kwa language family. Both languages are spoken in and around Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. 

I have been working with Atchan speakers since 2019, and have conducted five trips to Abidjan in order to work with the community. I have been supported by funding from the Oswalt Endangered Language Grant since 2021. Various components of this project are in collaboration with Yao Maxime Dido, a native speaker of Atchan and professor of linguistics at Université Alassane-Ouattara in Bouaké, as well as with Rebecca Jarvis (PhD candidate in Linguistics at UC Berkeley), Lindsay Hatch (undergraduate in Linguistics at UC Berkeley), and Kouame Timothée Kouadio (PhD student in Linguistics at Indiana University). The Atchan documentation team also includes undergraduate students who have worked on this project through the LRAP program at UC Berkeley at various times. 

In addition to my descriptive and theoretical work, I support ongoing maintenance and revitalization efforts in the Atchan-speaking community by facilitating orthography teaching workshops and developing the Atchan Song and Story Corpus, a user-friendly website where anyone can access subtitled videos of songs, stories and narratives in Atchan. For each text, I work with community members and undergraduate assistants to complete transcriptions in the Atchan orthography, translations into French and English, and glosses in both French and English, all of which are available on the website. 

In summers 2023 and 2024, I began working with several speakers of Nghlwa. Within the language, I am particularly interested in morpheme-specific nasalization, the marking of aspect, mood and polarity categories on subjects, and the phonological behavior of implosives. I have presented co-authored work with Alexandra Pfiffner (UC Berkeley) and Lindsay Hatch on the phonetics and phonology of implosives in Nghlwa at the LSA and ACAL. 

Kru: Guébie

My work with Guébie (ISO: gie), an endangered Kru language spoken in southwestern Côte d'Ivoire, began when I was an undergraduate at Georgetown University with my advisor Hannah Sande. Over the course of five trips to Gnagbodougnoa, Côte d'Ivoire, between 2019 and 2024, I have explored the interface between phonology and morphosyntax in Guébie, including patterns of negation expressed tonally on the subject and typologically unusual phonologically determined agreement. My published work on Guébie includes conference presentations at ACAL and WOCAL. My work with the Guébie community has also inspired a larger typological project, looking across all languages of the Kru family (more details here).  

Field Methods: Guaraní

My work with Paraguayan Guaraní, a Tupí-Guaraní language spoken in Paraguay, began during a Field Methods course at UC Berkeley taught by Lev Michael in fall 2020 and spring 2021, where we worked with two native speakers. Due to the pandemic, all fieldwork was conducted remotely over Zoom. In a paper in Languages, I published the first constraint-based analysis of nasal harmony in Paraguayan Guaraní. In a paper which has been accepted to Phonology, I describe the results of a corpus study I conducted on the variable application rate of nasal harmony in Paraguayan Guaraní, where I found that the morphosyntactic status of affixes significantly affects whether or not a harmonic allomorph is chosen. I also published a paper in the proceedings of the 2022 Annual Meeting on Phonology offering a prosodic analysis of reduplication in Paraguayan Guaraní. I am also interested in the diachronic development of nasal harmony in the larger Tupí-Guaraní family, and hope to collect data on the potential loss of harmony in the variety of Guaraní spoken in Corrientes, Argentina. I have been involved in a typological survey of nasal harmony systems in Tupian, the family which includes Tupí-Guaraní, with Myriam Lapierre (University of Washington) – more details here.