Morphological Complexity in Nuer
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Surrey
Department Name: English
Abstract
A notorious complicating factor in language comes from inflectional morphology, which is all the more striking because some languages have it and others do not. In English, for example, verbs inflect, and alongside a form such as 'sing', a speaker must know 'sings', 'sang', 'sung' and 'singing'. In Mandarin Chinese, where verbs do not inflect, a speaker only needs to know one form (chàng). But inflection is not just a matter of learning multiple forms -- speakers also need to negotiate a network of unpredictable and ambiguous relationships. For instance, English speakers do not just need to know that a verb must have a simple past tense form, they need to know that the past tense forms of 'sing', 'fling', 'bring' and 'ping' are all constructed in different ways ('sang', 'flung', 'brought' and 'pinged'), and that while 'sang' and 'hang' rhyme, one is a past tense form and the other present. While the inflectional system of English is still fairly simple, in other languages things may get considerably more complex.
One of the world's most extreme examples comes from Nuer, a language of the West Nilotic branch of the Nilo-Saharan language family, mainly spoken in the Republic of South Sudan. This complexity is not due so much to a large number of forms, but rather to their unpredictability and internal structure. This can be clearly seen in the case suffixes. On the face of it, the system is quite simple. There just two suffixes, -ka in the singular and -ni in the plural. But their behaviour is quite baffling, because their meaning varies according to the individual noun; for example, -ni can function as a genitive case suffix for some nouns, as a locative case for others, or as both, or even as a general plural suffix with no case-marking function at all. Speakers must learn how to use and recognize these forms, and select the correct function from this range of competing options. Besides suffixation, nouns may also inflect through various internal changes, as with English 'foot' versus 'feet'. But in Nuer this goes well beyond such vocalic alternations, and takes advantage of a rich system of prosodic features such as length, tone, and phonation type (breathy voice versus creaky voice). As with the suffixes, it is not possible to establish a fixed function for these features. For example, the genitive case of 'cow' is formed by vowel lengthening (yang ~ yaang) while that of 'person' is formed by shortening (raan ~ ran). Taken together, the patterns of suffixation and word-internal changes constitute a system whose complexity is matched by few languages in the world. This is of major interest both to the study of language and of cognition more generally, because the reigning linguistic and psychological models of inflection are based on systems which are considerably simpler.
But while we know enough about the language to appreciate the challenges it poses, we lack any detailed information. Very little about it is known about Nuer outside the speech community, and the existing descriptions are sketchy at best. Therefore, in this project we aim to produce the first comprehensive description of the inflectional morphology of Nuer, based on original fieldwork, at the same time illuminating aspects of its sound system, syntax and historical development. Alongside the structural complexities of the system, the prosodic system poses particular descriptive challenges of its own, in which the overlapping effects of tone, phonation type and the typologically unusual three-way vowel length distinction must be untangled through careful acoustic measurements. The results of this investigation will be important to students of language and the human mind, and will also have value to the speaker community in the development of orthographic standards, an ongoing process in the newly independent South Sudan.
One of the world's most extreme examples comes from Nuer, a language of the West Nilotic branch of the Nilo-Saharan language family, mainly spoken in the Republic of South Sudan. This complexity is not due so much to a large number of forms, but rather to their unpredictability and internal structure. This can be clearly seen in the case suffixes. On the face of it, the system is quite simple. There just two suffixes, -ka in the singular and -ni in the plural. But their behaviour is quite baffling, because their meaning varies according to the individual noun; for example, -ni can function as a genitive case suffix for some nouns, as a locative case for others, or as both, or even as a general plural suffix with no case-marking function at all. Speakers must learn how to use and recognize these forms, and select the correct function from this range of competing options. Besides suffixation, nouns may also inflect through various internal changes, as with English 'foot' versus 'feet'. But in Nuer this goes well beyond such vocalic alternations, and takes advantage of a rich system of prosodic features such as length, tone, and phonation type (breathy voice versus creaky voice). As with the suffixes, it is not possible to establish a fixed function for these features. For example, the genitive case of 'cow' is formed by vowel lengthening (yang ~ yaang) while that of 'person' is formed by shortening (raan ~ ran). Taken together, the patterns of suffixation and word-internal changes constitute a system whose complexity is matched by few languages in the world. This is of major interest both to the study of language and of cognition more generally, because the reigning linguistic and psychological models of inflection are based on systems which are considerably simpler.
But while we know enough about the language to appreciate the challenges it poses, we lack any detailed information. Very little about it is known about Nuer outside the speech community, and the existing descriptions are sketchy at best. Therefore, in this project we aim to produce the first comprehensive description of the inflectional morphology of Nuer, based on original fieldwork, at the same time illuminating aspects of its sound system, syntax and historical development. Alongside the structural complexities of the system, the prosodic system poses particular descriptive challenges of its own, in which the overlapping effects of tone, phonation type and the typologically unusual three-way vowel length distinction must be untangled through careful acoustic measurements. The results of this investigation will be important to students of language and the human mind, and will also have value to the speaker community in the development of orthographic standards, an ongoing process in the newly independent South Sudan.
Planned Impact
The project design incorporates a range of activities that will have demonstrable social and cultural benefits for the Nuer speaking communities in South Sudan and elsewhere, including the UK diaspora.
The Nuer form the second largest speech community of the new Republic of South Sudan, and education in indigenous languages has been a stated priority of the government of this new country. Development of a standard orthographic system is an essential step in the pursuit of activities involving community-led indigenous language maintenance (Lüpke 2011) such as dictionary writing (Mosel 2011) and curriculum development (Coronel-Molina and McCarty 2011). The production of resources of this kind is a precursor to increasing human capital, thereby creating pathways to the economic benefits associated with education.
Opportunities for attaining literacy in Nuer are currently very scarce. This is a reflection of a lack of resources; e.g. there are no dictionaries or grammar books, only some elementary primers. The problem is compounded by the lack of consistent orthographic standardization across texts. Currently a variety of writing systems are in circulation, none of which provide more than an approximate representation of the language. In particular, the prosodic features that play so crucial a role in the inflectional system, as well as the lexicon, have only ever been partially represented in writing.
Through careful linguistic analysis, our research has a clear potential to benefit the speaker community by addressing issues pertinent to resource development:
(i) Our acoustic and phonological analyses based on data collected in South Sudan and London will feed directly into recommendations for the development of orthographic standards.
(ii) The corpus of noun and verb paradigms elicited will form a solid basis for the development of a Nuer-English dictionary (and grammar).
Steps taken to feed our resources into an orthography development programme will be made through engagement with South Sudan-based community groups involved in literacy, as well as the Summer Institute of Linguistics (South Sudan branch). To facilitate the dissemination of our findings to stakeholders interested in participating in literacy development we will hold a workshop in Juba in the final year of the project. The goal of the workshop will be to facilitate and stimulate community-led work in this area. The workshop will create a network between elders, local community leaders, local linguists and teachers to provide a forum for discussion of key issues related to the development and implementation of a standardized script. We will also use this opportunity to discuss appropriate steps to provide literacy support and encourage its use among Nuer speakers.
Audio and video recordings of spontaneous texts, including narratives and songs will be made available (given appropriate permissions) to the online Nuer community through a web portal established for the dissemination for our proposed research on Nuer. In addition to forming a research tool for grammatical analysis and numerous potential applied uses, these texts act as a digital linguistic and cultural resource for Nuer in the diaspora, including individuals who identify as cultural Nuer, but do not speak the language. It is our particular desire that the availability of these resources will help to reinforce community identity and prestige among the UK Nuer speaking community, which so far lacks the resources and organization found in communities in North America and Australia.
The Nuer form the second largest speech community of the new Republic of South Sudan, and education in indigenous languages has been a stated priority of the government of this new country. Development of a standard orthographic system is an essential step in the pursuit of activities involving community-led indigenous language maintenance (Lüpke 2011) such as dictionary writing (Mosel 2011) and curriculum development (Coronel-Molina and McCarty 2011). The production of resources of this kind is a precursor to increasing human capital, thereby creating pathways to the economic benefits associated with education.
Opportunities for attaining literacy in Nuer are currently very scarce. This is a reflection of a lack of resources; e.g. there are no dictionaries or grammar books, only some elementary primers. The problem is compounded by the lack of consistent orthographic standardization across texts. Currently a variety of writing systems are in circulation, none of which provide more than an approximate representation of the language. In particular, the prosodic features that play so crucial a role in the inflectional system, as well as the lexicon, have only ever been partially represented in writing.
Through careful linguistic analysis, our research has a clear potential to benefit the speaker community by addressing issues pertinent to resource development:
(i) Our acoustic and phonological analyses based on data collected in South Sudan and London will feed directly into recommendations for the development of orthographic standards.
(ii) The corpus of noun and verb paradigms elicited will form a solid basis for the development of a Nuer-English dictionary (and grammar).
Steps taken to feed our resources into an orthography development programme will be made through engagement with South Sudan-based community groups involved in literacy, as well as the Summer Institute of Linguistics (South Sudan branch). To facilitate the dissemination of our findings to stakeholders interested in participating in literacy development we will hold a workshop in Juba in the final year of the project. The goal of the workshop will be to facilitate and stimulate community-led work in this area. The workshop will create a network between elders, local community leaders, local linguists and teachers to provide a forum for discussion of key issues related to the development and implementation of a standardized script. We will also use this opportunity to discuss appropriate steps to provide literacy support and encourage its use among Nuer speakers.
Audio and video recordings of spontaneous texts, including narratives and songs will be made available (given appropriate permissions) to the online Nuer community through a web portal established for the dissemination for our proposed research on Nuer. In addition to forming a research tool for grammatical analysis and numerous potential applied uses, these texts act as a digital linguistic and cultural resource for Nuer in the diaspora, including individuals who identify as cultural Nuer, but do not speak the language. It is our particular desire that the availability of these resources will help to reinforce community identity and prestige among the UK Nuer speaking community, which so far lacks the resources and organization found in communities in North America and Australia.
Organisations
Publications
Baerman
(2017)
Morphological Complexity
Baerman M
(2021)
Paradigmatic saturation in Nuer.
in Language
Baerman M
(2019)
Nominal inflection classes in verbal paradigms
in Morphology
Irina Monich
(2018)
Elements of Thok Naath (Nuer) Grammar
Monich I
(2020)
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics
Monich, I.
(2018)
From Sounds to Structures: Beyond the Veil of Maya
Reid Tatiana
(2019)
The phonology and morphology of the Nuer verb
Description | The project has succeeded in uncovering the phonological and morphphonological system of Nuer, which had defied description prior to this, and applied this to a detailed account of nominal and verbal morphology. Among the key observations are: Stem alternations in noun inflection, which previously had been understood to be entirely irregular, has been shown to consist of two interlocking components (vowel grade and length), whose relationship to suffixation is in part predictable. This confirms the complexity of the overall system; alongside this, we have found highly regular classes of deverbal nouns. In some varieties of Nuer there are nouns that display a morphophonologically unusual prefix, realized not on the noun itself, but by changes to final syllable of a preceding word. Stem-final consonant alternations, which had previously been described as an independent system, have been shown to be dependent on length. We have confirmed that there is a three-way length distinction (not demonstrated in prior descriptions), and described its role in morphology.We have discovered that there are important differences in this system between Eastern and Western varieties of Nuer. Three tonal distinctions have been identified, which interact in complex but predictable ways with phonation type of the vowel. Tone is an independent component of both verbal and nominal inflection and derivation. In verbal morphology it is closely connected with length classes. The derivational system of the verb has been shown to be much larger and more complex than originally thought, consisting of transitive antipassive, applicative, antipassive applicative, centripetal (or associated motion), multiplicative, causative and middle paradigms (each with 12 distinct forms). The analysis of Nuer has been adapted to the available materials on the related language Reel, which has allowed us to reconstruct in part the evolution of complexity in Nuer noun inflection. |
Exploitation Route | We have provided the necessary basis for all further research on the Nuer language. Besides its potential application to scholarship, these findings can be used in the development of dictionaries (there are currently none), for which our online lexicon is first step, as well as for pedagogical materials (primary school materials are only just now being developed in South Sudan). |
Sectors | Education,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
URL | http://www.nuerlexicon.com/ |
Description | The Nuer people face difficult challenges in supporting literacy in their language. Although a writing system was developed in the mid-20th century, the phonological and morphological complexity of the language has posed significant challenges for codification, and it has never been fully standardized. Efforts to remedy the situation have effectively stalled within South Sudan, owing to ongoing unrest and lack of financial resources. Learning materials are minimal, inconsistent in terms of their alphabets and spelling conventions and difficult to access. Our work with diaspora communities addresses these issues through language support activities and resources developed as a result of our phonological and morphological analyses of different Nuer dialects. The impact of our work is achieved through the provision of physical and digital resources, through facilitation of community outreach activities, and through speaker engagement with our online resources and community group. 1. Physical materials for heritage learners/Community workshops Like many immigrant communities, Nuer in the diaspora include a growing body of heritage speakers whose contact with the language is restricted to the family environment. There is strong motivation in the community to promote social cohesion through mother tongue literacy, but the sorts of resources that might normally be used to support learning and teaching of a language are lacking. To advance community goals to actively maintain Nuer usage in the diaspora, we first took steps at a local level, during our collaboration with communities in Southern California and in Nebraska, both major centres for East African refugee resettlement in North America. We produced a booklet on writing and grammar, reflecting our analyses of the phonological and grammatical system. To be maximally inclusive, the booklet and accompanying workshop included discussion of dialectal differences identified in our research, and proposed spelling reforms for the otherwise neglected West Nuer dialect. This was presented and discussed at three community workshops in 2018 in San Diego (California) and Omaha (Nebraska). A total of 130 community members participated in the workshops, where we distributed 280 copies of the booklet, which was designed to support both heritage learners and native speakers. The booklet is actively used in home instruction; in a recent call, John Kuek, psychologist at the La Maestra Community Health Center in San Diego and a prominent community organizer, told us "I have been teaching my kids. It's a very cool booklet you put together. It's very helpful, I'm telling you." 2. Digital resources for the global Nuer community/Online engagement A major outcome of our research was a sizeable corpus of fully-inflected nouns and verbs that has been optimised for the practical use of the Nuer community as the first searchable online Nuer-English dictionary. The website Nuer Lexicon was launched in September 2020 at www.nuerlexicon.com and by the end of 2020 had been visited by an average of 413 users per month in 63 countries worldwide, with the greatest activity recorded for three diaspora target groups in the USA, Kenya and UK. In this period South Sudan and Ethiopia were in the top 7 countries for bandwidth and hits. The site was launched with over 800 lexical items, exemplified by over 1100 noun and verb paradigms and 1400 audio recordings and examples. Users can search in Nuer and English and toggle between results in two modes, one aimed at Nuer speakers, rendered in our version of the practical orthography, and another aimed at linguists using transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The interactive interface allows users to reveal morphological patterns such a tone and vowel length alternations that are otherwise opaque to learners, since they are obscured by the writing system. The lexicon is designed to be an interactive and growing resource. Users are able to offer corrections to existing entries and to suggest new entries and example sentences. Up to the end of 2020, 103 new items were incorporated based on community suggestions, from speakers based in South Sudan, Kenya and the USA. To further facilitate community engagement we have established a Facebook group (with 4.9K members by March 2022) as a forum for our Nuer beneficiaries to discuss norms, definitions and spelling conventions. The educational value and potential of the lexicon has been noted by Tanya Spronk, Literacy and Education Coordinator for the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Juba, South Sudan (the major promotor of literacy efforts in the country), who writes 'something like this dictionary could become a spelling authority [] there is still nothing else like it that I know of in any South Sudanese language!' Jimma Guicwang, Nuer language interpreter for the UNHCR and other NGOs, writes 'Now, I will not be worry about where I will go for help or asking Nuer speakers to get the similar translations both English and Nuer vocabularies words because the Nuer Lexicon online dictionary will keep providing me the meaning words without difficulty.' Besides its usefulness as a language resource, the lexicon has emerged as an expression of cultural pride, and user response has been enthusiastic, as one user commented: "I just wanted to say thank you to everyone that involved large and small to make this wonderful language and loving language accessible online to many millions of people around the GLOBE." 3.Training In addition, during the course of the project we have trained a native speaker language consultant Rebecca Nyawany Makwach, who is based in Eastern Africa, techniques of linguistic data collection. She has learned the transcription conventions used to transcribe Nuer (International Phonetic Alphabet). She has acquired some practical skills required for data collection - the use of recording equipment required for linguistic data collection. She has been using this skill successfully over the period of the last 6 months to produce high quality recordings suitable for phonetic analysis recording herself and other speakers. She has been involved in recruiting native speaker consultants for the project which involves assessing their suitability, interviewing them by following instructions provided by the researchers, recording the data and sending it electronically to the team in the U.K. 4. Children's books In October 2021 we started the Nuer Literacy Initiative project, supported by funding from the AHRCs "Follow-on Funding for Impact and Engagement" scheme, with the aim to product 54 children's books in Nuer. These are produced through workshops with native speaker translators and storytellers. In February 2022 we held our first translation workshop (hybrid online and on site in Juba, South Sudan) and produced 20 book translations, which we are currently processing and quality checking. [Update 2023: all relevant impacts from this are now reported under AH/W006634/1.] |
Sector | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Education,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
Impact Types | Cultural,Societal |
Title | Nuer Lexicon |
Description | Online morphological lexicon of Nuer nouns and verbs, showing inflectional paradigms, dialectal variation, morphological analysis. Accompanied by sound files. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2020 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
Impact | The website Nuer Lexicon was launched in September 2020 at www.nuerlexicon.com and by the end of 2020 had been visited by an average of 413 users per month in 63 countries worldwide, with the greatest activity recorded for three diaspora target groups in the USA, Kenya and UK. In this period South Sudan and Ethiopia were in the top 7 countries for bandwidth and hits. The site was launched with over 800 lexical items, exemplified by over 1100 noun and verb paradigms and 1400 audio recordings and examples. Users can search in Nuer and English and toggle between results in two modes, one aimed at Nuer speakers, rendered in our version of the practical orthography, and another aimed at linguists using transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The interactive interface allows users to reveal morphological patterns such a tone and vowel length alternations that are otherwise opaque to learners, since they are obscured by the writing system. The lexicon is designed to be an interactive and growing resource. Users are able to offer corrections to existing entries and to suggest new entries and example sentences. Up to the end of 2020, 103 new items were incorporated based on community suggestions, from speakers based in South Sudan, Kenya and the USA. To further facilitate community engagement we have established a Facebook group (with 131 members by the end of 2020) as a forum for our Nuer beneficiaries to discuss norms, definitions and spelling conventions. The educational value and potential of the lexicon has been noted by Tanya Spronk, Literacy and Education Coordinator for the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Juba, South Sudan (the major promotor of literacy efforts in the country), who writes 'something like this dictionary could become a spelling authority [] there is still nothing else like it that I know of in any South Sudanese language!' Jimma Guicwang, Nuer language interpreter for the UNHCR and other NGOs, writes 'Now, I will not be worry about where I will go for help or asking Nuer speakers to get the similar translations both English and Nuer vocabularies words because the Nuer Lexicon online dictionary will keep providing me the meaning words without difficulty.' Besides its usefulness as a language resource, the lexicon has emerged as an expression of cultural pride, and user response has been enthusiastic, as one user commented: "I just wanted to say thank you to everyone that involved large and small to make this wonderful language and loving language accessible online to many millions of people around the GLOBE." |
URL | http://www.nuerlexicon.com/ |
Title | Nuerdle |
Description | Nuerdle is a game based on Wordle using our Nuer Lexicon to assist players |
Type Of Material | Data analysis technique |
Year Produced | 2022 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
Impact | spreading knowledge of Nuer as a language |
URL | https://smg-wordle.co.uk/ |
Description | "Consonantal mutation in Nuer". Talk by Irina Monich at the 49th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, Michigan State University, East Lansing MI, March 22-25, 2018 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | Novel data and analyses presented to a professional and student audience. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
URL | http://linglang.msu.edu/additional-programs/african/acal49/ |
Description | 2 June 2016. Morphological Saturation in Nuer. Linguistics Department seminar, University of Oxford. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | Sparked a lively discussion and generated useful feedback. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
Description | 2 June 2016. Nuer morphophonology: The verbal paradigm. P-workshop, University of Edinburgh. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Sparked discussion, was considered informative. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
Description | 20 June 2016. Variable distribution and approximate meaning. Analyzing Morphological Systems, University of Lyon, 20-22 June 2016 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | Sparked an interesting discussion. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
Description | 29 August 2016. Nuer morphophonology: vowel alternations in verbs. Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics, Leiden University, 29-31 August. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | Was enlightening to audience, who had never seen such data before. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
URL | https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/2016/08/call-2016 |
Description | 30 November 2016. Phonetic analysis as a tool to unlocking the Nuer vowel system. Linguistics and Languages Department Seminar, University of Nairobi. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | Primarily intended as a training seminar in acoustic analysis for students, and was considered helpful. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
Description | Agreement in Nuer speech reports (with T. Messick, University of Connecticut). 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 47). University of California, Berkeley, March 23-26, 2016 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | I gave a talk in collaboration with Troy Messick (University of Connecticut) titled "Agreement in Nuer speech reports". The presentation generated a lot of interest and was followed by a lively discussion. A proceedings paper has been submitted. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
URL | http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/acal47/ |
Description | Baerman, Matthew 7 March 2018 Sliding scales in morphology 'One-to-many relations in morphology, syntax, and semantics' workshop at the annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenshaft Stuttgart, 7-9 March 2018 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Paper given at international conference |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
Description | Baerman, Matthew and Irina Monich. 8 September 2017. Inflection class in mixed paradigms, The Morphological Eye, University of Surrey, 8-9 September 2017. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | paper at international conference |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | Baerman, Matthew, Irina Monich & Tatiana Reid. 8 September 2017 Inflection class in mixed paradigms The Morphological Eye University of Surrey, 8-9 September 2017 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Paper given at international conference |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | Baerman, Matthew, 7 March 2018. Sliding scales in morphology, 'One-to-many relations in morphology, syntax, and semantics' workshop at the annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenshaft. Stuttgart, 7-9 March 2018 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Paper at international conference |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | Baerman, Matthew, 7 March 2018. Sliding scales in morphology, 'One-to-many relations in morphology, syntax, and semantics' workshop at the annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenshaft. Stuttgart, 7-9 March 2018 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | talk at conference in Stuttgart |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
Description | Baerman, Matthew. 20 February 2016. Morphomic compositionality. International Morphology Meeting 17, Vienna, 18-21 February 2016. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Paper given at international conference |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
Description | Baerman, Matthew. 20 June 2016. Variable distribution and approximate meaning. Analyzing Morphological Systems, University of Lyon, 20-22 June 2016. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | paper given at international conference |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | Baerman, Matthew. 4 September 2015. Morphological opacity as a dimension of inflectional complexity. 48th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, workshop on Morphological Complexity. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Paper given at international conference |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
Description | Bond, Oliver and Tatiana Reid. 30 August 2018. Where and how many times? Valency in Nuer. 48th Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics. Leiden, 30 August - 1 September 2018 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Presented findings of the study to the specialist audience and students. Following the presentation there was a question time. Participants expressed great interest in the findings of the study. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
Description | Bond, Oliver and Tatiana Reid. Associated motion in Nuer. Invited talk at University of Gothenburg, 17 October 2019. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Invited talk at University of Gothenburg. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
Description | Default gender flip in North Omotic; talk at the New Fields for Morphology conference, 2nd-3rd of November 2018, University of Surrey |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | Conference talk that introduced a novel topic. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
URL | https://nfmw.github.io/index.html |
Description | Feist, Timothy and Matthew Baerman. 12 December 2017. Paradigmatic perspectives on morphological organisation. Presented at the 12th Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT) conference, Australian National University, Canberra, 11-15 December 2017. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | A number of members of the audience raised very interesting points after the presentation, leading to us refining our analysis. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | Irina Monich, Matthew Baerman and Bert Remijsen. 15 October 2016. Vowel Length in Nuer. Annual Meeting of North East Linguistic Society (NELS 47). University of Massachussets, Amherst, MA, 14-16 October. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Paper given at international conference |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
Description | Monich, Irina and Matthew Baerman 4-6 May 2017 Vowel gradation in Nuer nouns 13th Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium Addis Ababa, 4-6 May 2017 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Paper given at international conference |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | Monich, Irina and Matthew Baerman. 26 January 2017. Non-concatenative morphology in Nuer: A diachronic perspective. Diachronic morphology: Theoretical, areal, and phylogenetic perspectives, University of Zurich. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Paper given at international conference |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | Monich, Irina, Matthew Baerman and Oliver Bond 11 September 2017 Stable inflectional doublets 'Niches in Morphology' workshop at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea Zürich, 10-13 September 2017 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Paper given at international conference |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | Monich, Irina, Matthew Baerman and Oliver Bond. 11 September 2017. Stable inflectional doublets, 'Niches in Morphology' workshop at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. Zürich, 10-13 September 2017. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Paper at international conference |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | Monich, Irina. 17 December 2017. Workshop on the grammar of Thok Nath to present findings to the members of the Nuer community of San Diego. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Study participants or study members |
Results and Impact | 'Workshop on the grammar of Thok Nath" to present our findings to the members of the Nuer community of San Diego. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | Monich, Irina. 25 May 2017. Emergence of contour tones in Nuer and Dinka. Manchester Phonology Meeting (MFM), University of Manchester, May 25-27, 2017 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Talk at conference |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | Morphological opacity as a dimension of inflectional complexity' 48th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, workshop on Morphological Complexity, 4 September 2015 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Type Of Presentation | paper presentation |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | some listeners pointed out that it gave them a new way of thinking about the subject workshop organizers solicited a book chapter based on the talk (declined) |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
URL | http://sle2015.eu/downloads/workshops/Morphological%20complexity-%20Empirical%20and%20cross-linguist... |
Description | Morphomic Compositionality. International Morphology Meeting 17, Vienna, 20 Feb 2016 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | The talk sparked considerable interest. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
URL | https://www.wu.ac.at/home/imm17/ |
Description | Non-concatenative morphology in Nuer: A diachronic perspective. Diachronic morphology: Theoretical, areal, and phylogenetic perspectives, 26 January 2017. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | Presentation at workshop in connection with University of Zurich project. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
URL | http://www.arealmorphology.uzh.ch/en/limits/Workshops/DIAMOR.html |
Description | Nuer Lexicon Facebook Group |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | Nuer Lexicon Facebook group set up to engage with Nuer speakers internationally to discuss the language and to gain more examples of use of grammar |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
URL | https://www.facebook.com/groups/nuerlexicon |
Description | Nuer morphophonology: the verbal paradigm. Linguistics Dept. seminar at SOAS, 8 March 2016 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | The talk was highly informative. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
URL | https://www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics/events/deptseminars/08mar2016-nuer-morphophonology-the-verbal-par... |
Description | Paradigmatic saturation in Nuer (Linguistics Colloquium, University of Mainz, 20 January 2020) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
Results and Impact | Talk on linguistic complexity for students at the University of Mainz. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
Description | Presentation on the Nuer language to the Nuer congregation at Wildewood Christian Church, Omaha, NE |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
Results and Impact | The response was very good. One of the comments was that the presentation was 'truly incredible'. We received a lot of offers of collaboration on Nuer reference materials. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
Description | Presentation on the Nuer language to the Nuer congregation at the First Presbyterian Church in Lincoln, NE |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
Results and Impact | There were many questions that followed the presentation. The questions centred around dialectal differences, orthography and a way to standardize writing. As always, there was a great interest in educational and reference materials, and again, I received many offers of collaboration and expressions of gratitude. About 230 copies of expanded booklets were distributed in Nebraska between members of Omaha and Lincoln Nuer communities. Many members expressed intention to use them for educating the children, in particularly in Nuer classes that are conducted at the church for the benefit of the second generation of expatriates. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
Description | Presentation on the Nuer language to the Nuer congregation at the Presbyterian Church of San Diego |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
Results and Impact | About 50 booklets (Elements of Thok Nath Grammar) were distributed at the presentation. The presentation covered the material presented in the booklet. During the talk, the audience participated by repeating lexical items that were used as examples, making note of the patterns that were illustrated. Following the main talk, there was a lively question/answer period and discussion. There were questions on tone, Nuer history, and specific grammatical constructions. Some members of the audience came up to the whiteboard to explain various observations made in the presentation to other audience members. There was a discussion of orthography - a topic that is of great interest to the Nuer but also is a subject of much disagreement and controversy. As always, the participants expressed a great desire for educational and reference materials on Nuer. Following the presentation, members of the Nuer community expressed a great interest in the booklets that were distributed. One of the contacts reported that he got hundreds of requests from the members of the Nuer community all over the world. He sent a few screenshots exemplifying the requests, and there were some requests for the booklets made by the people in the comments to the videos. Following the presentation, some of the participants filled out questionnaires on their attitudes towards the presentation and towards the project. Video excerpts from the talk were shared online by some of the participants. One of the videos garnered 4067 views. Following the success of the presentation in San Diego, we were invited to present our findings to the members of the Nuer community in Nebraska, USA. For these presentations we extended the booklet to include more information on tone, derivational morphology and more information on dialectal differences. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | Reid, Tatiana and Matthew Baerman. 4 May 2017. Vowels in Nuer morphophonology (the case of transitive verbs). The 13th NiloSaharan Linguistics Colloquium, The University of Addis Ababa, 4-6 May 2017. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | paper at international conference |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | Reid, Tatiana. 31 August 2018. Tone in Nuer: a case of disyllabic verbs. 48th Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics. Leiden, 30 August - 1 September 2018 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Presented findings of the study to the specialist audience and students. Following the presentation there was a question time. Participants expressed interest in the findings of the study & the author made new contacts in the field. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
Description | Reid, Tatiana. A study of Nuer verbs: reporting on data collection in Kenya. Surrey Linguistic Circle, University of Surrey. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Reporting on a nine months long data collection field trip to East Africa |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | Reid, Tatiana. Morphophonological stratification in Nuer: vowel and voice quality. Invited talk at Université Paris 8, Sciences du langage. 15 November 2017. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Invited talk at a phonology department |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | Reid, Tatiana. Vowels in Nuer morphophonology (the case of transitive verbs). The 13th NiloSaharan Linguistics Colloquium, The University of Addis Ababa, 4-6 May 2017. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | A talk at an international specialist conference held in Ethiopia |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | Sliding scales in morphology; talk at the workshop 'One-to-many relations in morphology, syntax, and semantics' at the Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Sprachwissenschaft annual meeting, University of Stuttgart, 7-9 March 2018 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | A conference talk that introduced novel material. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
URL | http://drehu.linguist.univ-paris-diderot.fr/one2many-dgfs2018/ |
Description | Stem modification in Nuer. 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 47). University of California, Berkeley, March 23-26, 2016 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | We gave a talk titled "Stem modification in Nuer". The purpose of the talk was to inform researchers working in the field of African linguistics on the early findings of our project. The talk was followed by a question and answer period. Several researchers expressed interest in the data that we presented. A proceedings paper has been submitted. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
URL | http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/acal47/ |
Description | Tatiana Reid. 15 November 2017. A study of Nuer verbs: reporting on data collection in Kenya. Surrey Linguistics Circle University of Surrey |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Increased knowledge |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | The internal and external typology of paradigms (with Greville G. Corbett) Invited talk, LAGB Workshop on Morphological Complexity, University College London, 18 September 2015 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Type Of Presentation | keynote/invited speaker |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | talk was informative and stimulated thinking Lively discussion. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
URL | http://www.lagb.org.uk/Resources/programmes/LAGB2015programme.pdf |
Description | Three Degrees of Vowel Length in Nuer. Annual Meeting in Phonology (AMP). University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, October 21-23. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | A poster titled "Vowel Length in Nuer" presenting our findings on a typologically rare feature of Nuer. There was a lot of interest in regards to the data. A proceedings paper has been submitted. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
URL | https://amp2016usc.wordpress.com/ |
Description | Three-way length alternations in morphology; keynote talk at the 3rd Saami Linguistics Symposium, Freiburg, 18-20 October 2017 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | A presentation of a wide range of novel material to a professional audience. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
URL | https://www.frias.uni-freiburg.de/en/events/conferences/saals-3-3rd-saami-linguistic-symposium-1 |
Description | Vowel Length in Nuer. Annual Meeting of North East Linguistic Society (NELS 47). University of Massachussets, Amherst, MA, October 14-16. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | A poster titled "Vowel Length in Nuer" describing our findings in regards to a typologically rare feature in Nuer. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
URL | http://umass2016.nelsconference.org/ |