Downloadable publications

For a full publication list, please see my CV. Many of the papers linked to here are prepublication versions only and may have undergone significant revision upon publication. Please feel free to contact me if you would like a copy of a paper that you do not see here.

To appear

Historical morphosyntax and syntactic change. In Lutz Marten, Nancy C. Kula, Jochen Zeller, and Ellen Hurst (eds.), The Oxford guide to the Bantu languages. Oxford: OUP.

2023

Language contact or linguistic micro-engineering? Feature pools, social semiosis, and intentional language change in the Cameroonian Grassfields. Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3. 72–125. (with Pierpaolo Di Carlo)

Language change in small-scale multilingual societies: Trees, waves, and magnets?. In Darya Kavitskaya and Alan C. L. Yu (eds.), The Life Cycle of Language: Past, Present, and Future. Oxford: OUP.

2022

Adapting methods of language documentation to multilingual settings. Journal of Language Contact 15. 341–375.

Reconstructing the development of the Bantu Final Vowel. In Koen Bostoen, Rozenn Guérois, Sara Pacchiarotti, and Gilles-Maurice de Schryver (eds.), Reconstructing Proto-Bantu Grammar. Berlin: Language Science Press. 173–234.

Public health information for minority linguistic communities. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 100:78–80. (with Pierpaolo Di Carlo, Bradley McDonnell, Lisa Vahapoğlu, Mandana Seyfeddinipur, and Katarzyna Kordas)

The scope of linguistic data. In Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker, Bradley McDonnell, Eve Koller, and Lauren B. Collister (eds.), Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press. 27–47.

2021

How to document multilingualism? Towards a coherent methodology: Dealing with speech data. International Journal of Bilingualism 25:860–877. (with Pierpaolo Di Carlo and Rachel A. Ojong Diba)

COVID-19 and documentary linguistics: Some ways forward. Language Documentation and Description 20:359–377. (with Nicholas Williams, Wilson de Lima Silva, and Laura McPherson)

2019

Multilingualism in Rural Africa. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. (with Pierpaolo Di Carlo and Rachel Ojong)

Cultural distinctiveness and linguistic esoterogeny: The case of the Fang language of Lower Fungom, Cameroon. In Pius Akumbu and Esther P. Chie (eds.) Engagement with Africa. Linguistic essays in honor of Ngessimo M. Mutaka. 163–178. Köln: Köppe. (with Mve, Patrick, Nelson C. Tschonghongei, Pierpaolo Di Carlo)

2018

Reflections on the scope of language documentation. In Bradley, McDonnell, Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker, and Gary Holton (eds.), Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998. Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication no. 15:13–21.

Socio-spatial networks, multilingualism, and language use in a rural African context. In Paolo Fogliaroni, Andrea Ballatore, and Eliseo Clementini (eds.), Proceedings of Workshops and Posters at the 13th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2017). Berlin: Springer. 35–39. (with Pierpaolo Di Carlo, Ling Bian, Yujia Pan and Penghang Liu)

Niger-Congo. Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics.

East Benue-Congo noun classes, with a focus on their morphological behavior. In John Watters (ed.), Proto–East-Benue-Congo. Monographs on Comparative Niger-Congo. Berlin: Language Sciences Press. 27–57.

Ethics in language documentation and revitalization. In Kenneth Rehg and Lyle Campbell (eds.), Oxford handbook of endangered languages. Oxford: OUP. 419–440.

Modeling signifiers in constructional approaches to morphological analysis. In Geert Booij (ed.), The construction of words: Advances in Construction Morphology. Dordrecht: Springer. 19–57.

2017

Niger-Congo languages. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), The Cambridge handbook of areal linguistics. Cambridge: CUP. 471–499.

Remarks on the nasal classes in Mungbam and Naki. In Raija Kramer and Roland Kießling (eds.), Mechthildian approaches to Afrikanistik: Advances in language based research on Africa–Festschrift für Mechthild Reh. Köln: Köppe. 83–99. (with Jesse Lovegren)

2014

Beyond the ancestral code: Towards a model for sociolinguistic language documentation. Language Documentation & Conservation 8:16–191. (with Tucker Childs and Alice Mitchell)

What are we trying to preserve? Diversity, change, and ideology at the edge of the Cameroonian Grassfields. In Peter K. Austin and Julia Sallabank (eds.), Endangered languages: Beliefs and ideologies in language documentation and revitalization. Oxford: OUP. 229–262. (with Pierpaolo Di Carlo)

2013

A (micro-)accretion zone in a remnant zone? Lower Fungom in areal–historical perspective. In Language Typology and Historical Contingency: In honor of Johanna Nichols. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 265–282.

Languoid, doculect, and glossonym: Formalizing the notion “language”. Language Documentation & Conservation 7:331–359. (with Michael Cysouw)

2011

The typology of templates. Language and Linguistics Compass 5:731–747.

Data and language documentation. Peter Austin and Julia Sallabank (eds.), Handbook of Endangered Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 212–234.

Valuing technology: Finding the linguist's place in a new technological universe. In Louanna Furbee and Lenore Grenoble (eds.), Language documentation: Practice and values. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 111–131.

2010

A Grand Challenge for Linguistics: Scaling Up and Integrating Models. White paper contributed to NSF's SBE 2020: Future Research in the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences initiative. (with Emily M. Bender)

Topic and focus fields in Naki. In Ines Fiedler and Anne Schwarz (eds.), The Expression of Information Structure: A documentation of its diversity across Africa. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 35–68.

Ethical issues in legacy language resources. Language and Communication 30:162–170. (with Carolyn O’Meara)

Modeling and encoding traditional wordlists for machine applications. Proceedings of the 2010 Workshop on NLP and Linguistics: Finding the Common Ground, ACL 2010. Uppsala, Sweden: Association for Computational Linguistics. 1–9. (with Shakthi Poornima)

Modeling wordlists via Semantic Web technologies. In Paul Buitelaar, Philipp Cimiano, and Elena Montiel-Ponsoda (eds.), Proceedings of the First International Workshop on the Multilingual Semantic Web (MSW 2010). Raleigh, North Carolina. (with Shakthi Poornima)

2009

African languages and linguistic typology. Unpublished ms. Intended as an introductory textbook chapter.

Practical language development: Whose mission? Language 85:619–629. (with Lise Dobrin)

Loanwords in Saramaccan. In Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmoor (eds.), Loanwords in the world's languages: A comparative handbook. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 918–943.

Saramaccan vocabulary. In Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor (eds.), World Loanword Database. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library. 1103 word entries.

A twice-mixed creole? Tracing the history of a prosodic split in the Saramaccan lexicon. Studies in Language 33:459–498.

Implementation for discovery: A bipartite lexicon to support morphological and syntactic analysis. Proceedings of Chicago Linguistic Society 41: Panel on Computational Linguistics. 1–16. (with Emily M. Bender)

2008

Introduction. In Jeff Good (ed.) Linguistics Universals and Language Change. Oxford: Oxford University. 1–19.

2007

Slouching towards deponency: A family of mismatches in the Bantu verb stem In Matthew Baerman, Greville G. Corbett, Dunstan Brown, and Andrew Hippisley (eds.), Deponency and morphological mismatches. Oxford: Oxford University. 203–230.

Strong linearity, weak linearity, and the typology of templates. In Matti Miestamo and Bernhard Waelchli (eds.), New challenges in typology: Broadening the horizons and redefining the foundations. Berlin: Mouton. 11–33.

When arguments become adjuncts: Negation and object preposing in Leggbó. In Jonathan E. Cihlar, Amy L. Franklin, David W. Kaiser and Irene Kimbara (eds.), Proceedings of Chicago Linguistic Society 39: Main session. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. 110–129.

The ecology of documentary and descriptive linguistics. In Peter K. Austin (ed.), Language Documentation and Description, Volume 4. London: SOAS.

2006

The phonetics of tone in Saramaccan. In Ana Deumert and Stephanie Durrleman (eds.), Structure and variation in language contact. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 9–28.

Modeling contested categorization in linguistic databases. Proceedings of the EMELD Workshop 2006: Digital Language Documentation: Tools and Standards: The State of the Art. Lansing, Michigan. July 20–22, 2006.

2005

Reconstructing morpheme order in Bantu: The case of causativization and applicativization. Diachronica 22:55–109.

Morphosyntax of two Turkish subject pronominal paradigms. In Lorie Heggie and Francisco Ordóñez (eds.). Clitic and affix combinations: Theoretical perspectives. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 315–341. (with Alan Yu)

Split prosody and creole simplicity: The case of Saramaccan. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics 3:11–30.

Can GOLD ‘cope’ with WALS? Retrofitting an ontology onto the World Atlas of Languages Structures. Proceedings of the E-MELD Workshop 2005: Linguistic Ontologies and Data Categories for Language Resources, July 1–3, 2005, Cambridge, Massachusetts. (with Michael Cysouw, Hans-Jörg Bibiko, and Mihai Albu)

2004

Tone and accent in Saramaccan: Charting a deep split in the phonology of a language. Lingua 114:575–619.

The descriptive grammar as a (meta)database. Proceedings of the E-MELD Workshop 2004: Linguistic Databases and Best Practice, July 15–18, 2004, Detroit, Michigan.

Montage: Leveraging advances in grammar engineering, linguistic ontologies, and mark-up for the documentation of underdescribed languages. Proceedings of the Workshop on First Steps for Language Documentation of Minority Languages: Computational Linguistic Tools for Morphology, Lexicon and Corpus Compilation, LREC 2004. (with Emily M. Bender, Dan Flickinger, and Ivan A. Sag)

2002

The vowel systems of California Hokan. Survey Report #12: Papers from the 50th anniversary conference of the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages.

2001

Creating a database and query-tools for the TELL multi-speaker linguistic corpus. Proceedings from the IRCS Workshop on Linguistic Databases, University of Pennsylvania, December 11–13, 2001. (with Ronald Sprouse)

2000

SGML markup of dictionaries with special reference to comparative and etymological data. Proceedings from the Workshop on Web-Based Language Documentation and Description, University of Pennsylvania, December 12–15, 2000.


Selected handouts, presentations, and drafts

2010

Interoperability for Language Documentation The Role of Semantic Web Tools. (with Tom Myers and Alexander Nakhimovsky)

A sketch of the Ajumbu [muc] noun class system.

A sketch of the Naki [mff] noun class system.

2009

Reassessing Western Beboid. Presented at Bantu 3: Third International Conference on Bantu Languages. Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium, March 26. (with Jesse Lovegren)

2008

Information structure, argument linearization, and word order typology in Bantoid. Presented at the annual meeting of the L.S.A., Chicago, January 6, 2008.

2006

The Bantu verbal prefixes and S-Aux-O-V order in Benue-Congo. Presented at the Special Session on the Synchrony and Diachrony of the Bantu Verb at the Bantu Grammar: Description and Theory conference, SOAS. April 22. (with Tom Güldemann)

Rarum begets rarum: A rare clitic and morphosyntactic reduplication in Chechen and Ingush. Presented at the Rara and Rarissima conference, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, March 29.

Constraining morphosyntactic templates: A case study of Bantu verbal suffixes. Presented at the annual meeting of the LSA, Albuquerque, January 2006.

2004

A sketch of Atsugewi phonology. Presented at the annual winter meeting of SSILA. Boston, January 8–11, 2004.

2003

Reconstructing Achumawi and Atsugewi: Proto-Palaihnihan revisited. Presented at the annual winter meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas. Atlanta, January 2–5. (with Mary Paster and Teresa McFarland)

2002

On the origin of a verb phrase template in Chechen and Ingush. Presented at the meeting of the LSA San Francisco, January 3–6, 2002.