Faculty & Graduate Research Projects

Linguistics professor Claire Halpert and the American Indian Studies department’s Brendan Kishketon and Nora Livesay co-lead this three-year NSF/NEH grant project, which seeks to further document Ojibwe, an endangered Indigenous language, and to share the linguistic knowledge gained with the community, scholars, and the public. New interview audio and written historical materials will be used to expand the online Ojibwe People’s Dictionary and create an open-access linguistic corpus of Ojibwe. Additionally, the project focuses on mentoring and training Indigenous language workers to explore linguistic topics related to their own research interests, developing pedagogical materials for teaching second-language learners, with plans to develop a workshop for prospective Indigenous college students.

Led by professor Diti Bhadra, this five-year NSF CAREER grant project will bring together formal semantics and pragmatics research, semantic fieldwork in understudied languages, and an investigation of semantic typologies, isoglosses, and variation, in the large linguistic area of South Asia. The project focuses on the usage and interpretation of "discourse particles," which are linguistic units (often small function words in a sentence) that track and convey various contextual aspects of interpersonal conversations.

Project director and linguistics professor Hooi Ling Soh, with the help of several cross-discipline university students and native-speaker volunteers, is building a corpus of Hmong texts and audio/video files as a resource for researchers, language learners, and teachers. Funded by a 2023 CLA Seed Grant for Social Science Research, and supported by the CLA Liberal Arts Engagement Hub Residency from 2024 to 2026, this corpus consists of immigrant stories, folktales, selected book chapters, Hmong language materials available on government websites, and social media posts, in both the Hmong Daw and Mong Leng dialects. The corpus also functions as a searchable bilingual dictionary, showing Hmong words used in context, with the texts translated into English word-for-word and at the sentence level.

PhD student Mskwaankwad Rice and professor Claire Halpert collaborate on this NSF-DDRI project, which investigates a number of syntactic and semantic phenomena in Ojibwe, involving clause type; expression of tense, aspect, and modality; the syntax of clausal embeddings; and counterfactuality. Using original research and field interviews with native speakers, this project is an in-depth linguistic examination of how and when to use specific grammatical patterns depending on the situation and the speaker’s intent, which serves to further linguistic understanding of how human language functions and to document and support an endangered Indigenous language.