Norval Smith's research

Research

1) Phonology

I am firstly interested in questions of segmental and syllabic structure. The theoretical model I use is Dependency Phonology, within an Optimality Framework. Additional concerns are the representation of Vowel Harmony, questions of Lenition, and the relationship between syllable and foot structure.

For these aspects of my research I participate in the ACLC Research Group on Bidrectional Phonology and Phonetics.

Another research interest is pitch-accent languages. Particular questions are Level Stress phenomena, and tonal polarity. An article on Level Stress in Wursten Frisian will appear in Nowele in 2007.

For this I participate in the ACLC Research Group on Franconian Tones.

2) Creole Linguistics

The morphology and phonology of Atlantic English-based creole languages, and their substrates.

For this I participate in the ACLC Research Group on Language Creation, of which I am joint coordinator.

3)  Phonological Reconstitution

I am very interested in what can be got out of pre-modern grammatical descriptions, pieces of text in naive orthography, and the linguistics field-notes of 19th century and early 20th century amateur linguists and anthropologists.

Projects include work on extinct Yokuts dialects, extinct Frisian dialects, older forms of Gbe (West Africa), extinct Scottish Gaelic dialects.

For this I participate in the ACLC Research Group Linguistics at two removes.

Title new paragraph

Text of the new paragraph