Research

A cradleboard.

All of my research publications are about the Northern Iroquoian languages, mainly Oneida and Mohawk, but I have worked some with speakers of all the languages. I have been doing my best to understand how these languages work together with native speakers for over forty years—what the sounds are like, the rhythmic and accentual patterns, what happens when words are spoken naturally one after the other, how words are formed, how words are put together to express concepts that cannot be expressed in a single word (although a lot can be expressed in a single word), and, last but not least, the different ways that meaningful and cultural categories are expressed.

In my quest to keep learning, I have been fortunate to have collaborated the last fifteen years or so with Jean-Pierre Koenig on theoretical and typological issues in morphology, syntax and semantics where Oneida makes a special contribution to our understanding of human languages. We have published papers on argument structure, kinship terms, inflectional morphology, negation, semantic composition, quantification (how to count things), and possession. I have also been fortunate to have met speakers who have kept me inspired and excited to keep delving into the Oneida language.

Three masterful speakers who I became particularly close to and sadly who are no longer around are the late Georgina Nicholas, Mercy Doxtator, and Norma Kennedy. We collaborated on producing a dictionary of Oneida, as spoken at the Oneida Nation of the Thames settlement in Ontario and on collections of texts.