Native American linguistics and anthropology
Working with Northern Arapaho elders in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
Photo courtesy of Sara Wiles, Lander, WY
My work and interests
(detailed annotated bibliography)
I have decided to devote extremely intense attention to a single Algonquian language group, Arapahoan, which includes Arapaho, Gros Ventre/Atsina, and two poorly documented dialects no longer in existence, those of the Beesoowuunenino' and Nowoo3ineheeno'. My goal is to provide extremely rich documentation of this group, focused on natural discourse and multi-modal language behaviors, as documented through time-aligned video. I am currently working to produce a database of 100,000 lines of time-aligned, transcribed, translated, interlinearized and annotated natural discourse in Arapaho, along with an accompanying lexical database (currently funded through a NSF/NEH Documenting Endangered Languages grant). This would be one of the largest and richest databases of an indigenous Native American language, and would offer the opportunity for the application of many corpus and statistical techniques, as well as providing an important resource for the Arapaho people.
For linguists, the database will allow a much better understanding of Arapaho syntax, which is fundamentally driven by pragmatics, since there is no fixed word order. More generally, I am interested in the way that pragmatic saliency determines not only word order, but also morphosyntactic constructions and morphological patterns, and how these features interact with the semantics of verb stems in this agglutinating, polysynthetic language. Cowell and Moss 2008 is a comprehensive grammar of the language. I am currently working on a dictionary. I am also working on a historical grammar and text collection of Gros Ventre/Atsina.
For anthropologists, the database and accompanying lexical database will provide rich documentation of many different speech genres, including joking and teasing, respect and avoidance behaviors, formal and informal narrative, collaborative narratives, speeches, songs, task-oriented speech, biography and autobiography, ethnographic and historical records, and extensive everyday conversation. I have also done extensive documentation on ethnobotany and ethnozoology as well as ethnoastronomy, drawing on previous employment with the National Audubon Society and Hawaii Audubon Society. Cowell and Moss 2005 and Cowell, Moss and C'Hair 2014 are bilingual anthologies of Arapaho oral literature, which is a particular interest of mine. I am currently working on a third anthology, as well as an ethnographic study of language use and endangerment: Naming the World: Language and Power among the Northern Arapaho.
For the Arapaho and Gros Ventre communities, I have tried to share data I have obtained quickly and cheaply, through many non-refereed publications and other products. These include a cultural-education website and a language-learning website, both done in collaboration with the community, as well as an educational video/DVD and an educational set of CD-ROMs. I have also worked with community members to produce many booklets with language and cultural resource information, and have also taught beginning Arapaho, curriculum development, technology skills, and foreign-language teaching methods at Wind River Tribal College over the years.
Other work includes a database of all available Southern Sierra Miwok language, with current plans to complete an additional database for Central Sierra Miwok. The goal is to apply statistical techniques to this material in order to gain a better understanding of Miwok - and hopefully Penutian - syntax.