Glyne Piggott

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Glyne Piggott is an emeritus professor of linguistics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. During his four decades at McGill, he served terms as associate dean of the faculty of arts, as well as director of undergraduate studies, graduate program director, and chair of the department of linguistics. He was the vice-president and president-elect of the Canadian Linguistic Association from 2002 to 2003.

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To commemorate his retirement in 2010, a conference entitled "Phonology in the 21st Century: In Honour of Glyne Piggott" was hosted by McGill University. [1]

Contribution to linguistics

A celebrated scholar in the fields of phonology and morphology, Piggott completed his graduate studies at the University of Toronto with a focus on Amerindian languages, particularly Ojibwa. His research on Ojibwa phonology has been instrumental to the analysis of nasal vowels in that language. Further research on syllabification and stress assignment has established a dichotomy between languages whose syllabification relies on the use of codas and those whose right-edge constituents are best analyzed as the onsets of empty-headed syllables. [2]

Piggott has been on the editorial board of journals such as The Linguistic Review , [3] member of the advisory board for numerous conferences including the Manchester Phonology Meeting, [4] and an evaluator on departmental review committees, such as for the Linguistics Department of Memorial University in Newfoundland. [5]

Educational outreach

Born and educated in Barbados, Piggott has been an outspoken supporter of universal education in the Caribbean. His contribution to scholarship, education, and the Barbadian community was celebrated at the 30th-anniversary ceremony of the Modernite Association of Toronto in 2014. [6] He is a special advisor for the Superkutz Scholarship Foundation, a not-for-profit organization providing scholarships for Montreal youth who lack the funds to pursue higher education, [7] and a member of the board of directors and scholarship selection committee for the Quebec Black Medical Association. [8]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phonology</span> Study of sound organization in languages

Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but may now relate to any linguistic analysis either:

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds, typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins. Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre and its stress patterns. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ignite is made of two syllables: ig and nite.

In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word splits. In the education field it is variously called a consonant cluster or a consonant blend.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ojibwe language</span> Central Algonquian language of North America

Ojibwe, also known as Ojibwa, Ojibway, Otchipwe, Ojibwemowin, or Anishinaabemowin, is an indigenous language of North America of the Algonquian language family. The language is characterized by a series of dialects that have local names and frequently local writing systems. There is no single dialect that is considered the most prestigious or most prominent, and no standard writing system that covers all dialects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Valley Yokuts</span> Yokutsan dialect cluster of California, US

Valley Yokuts is a dialect cluster of the Yokutsan language family of California.

Prenasalized consonants are phonetic sequences of a nasal and an obstruent that behave phonologically like single consonants. The primary reason for considering them to be single consonants, rather than clusters as in English finger or member, lies in their behaviour; however, there may also be phonetic correlates which distinguish prenasalized consonants from clusters. Because of the additional difficulty in both articulation and timing, prenasalized fricatives and sonorants are not as common as prenasalized stops or affricates, and the presence of the former implies the latter. Only three languages have been reported to have a contrast between prenasalized consonants (NC) and their corresponding clusters (NC).

The phonology of the Ojibwe language varies from dialect to dialect, but all varieties share common features. Ojibwe is an indigenous language of the Algonquian language family spoken in Canada and the United States in the areas surrounding the Great Lakes, and westward onto the northern plains in both countries, as well as in northeastern Ontario and northwestern Quebec. The article on Ojibwe dialects discusses linguistic variation in more detail, and contains links to separate articles on each dialect. There is no standard language and no dialect that is accepted as representing a standard. Ojibwe words in this article are written in the practical orthography commonly known as the Double vowel system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Patricia Alice Shaw</span> Canadian linguist

Patricia Alice Shaw is a Canadian linguist specializing in phonology and known for her work on First Nations languages.

The sonority sequencing principle (SSP) or sonority sequencing constraint is a phonotactic principle that aims to outline the structure of a syllable in terms of sonority.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ottawa dialect</span> Native American dialect

Ottawa or Odawa is a dialect of the Ojibwe language spoken by the Odawa people in southern Ontario in Canada, and northern Michigan in the United States. Descendants of migrant Ottawa speakers live in Kansas and Oklahoma. The first recorded meeting of Ottawa speakers and Europeans occurred in 1615 when a party of Ottawas encountered explorer Samuel de Champlain on the north shore of Georgian Bay. Ottawa is written in an alphabetic system using Latin letters, and is known to its speakers as Nishnaabemwin 'speaking the native language' or Daawaamwin 'speaking Ottawa'.

Ottawa is a dialect of the Ojibwe language spoken in a series of communities in southern Ontario and a smaller number of communities in northern Michigan. Ottawa has a phonological inventory of seventeen consonants and seven oral vowels; in addition, there are long nasal vowels the phonological status of which are discussed below. An overview of general Ojibwa phonology and phonetics can be found in the article on Ojibwe phonology. The Ottawa writing system described in Modern orthography is used to write Ottawa words, with transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) used as needed.

Traditional Ottawa stories fall into two general categories, aasookaan 'legend, sacred story' and dbaajmowin 'narrative, story'. Stories in the aasookaan category involve mythical characters such as Nenbozh. Stories in the dbaajmowin category include traditional stories that do not necessarily involve mythical characters, with the same term also used more generally to refer to any type of story not in the aasookaan category. Published Ottawa text material includes a range of genres, including historical narratives, stories of conflict with other indigenous groups, humorous stories, and others.

Tampuan is the language of Tampuan people indigenous to the mountainous regions of Ratanakiri Province in Cambodia. As of the 2008 census there were 31,000 speakers, which amounts to 21% of the province's population. It is closely related to Bahnar and Alak, the three of which form the Central Bahnaric language grouping within the Mon-Khmer language family according to traditional classification. Sidwell's more recent classification groups Tampuan on an equal level with Bahnar and the South Bahnaric languages in a larger Central Bahnar group. The Tampuan language has no native writing. EMU International began linguistic research in 1995 and produced an alphabet using Khmer letters. The alphabet was further refined by linguists from International Cooperation for Cambodia (ICC) and the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport (MOEYS). The modified Khmer script was approved by MOEYS in 2003 for use in bilingual education programs for Tampuan implemented by ICC, UNESCO, and CARE.

In linguistics, Optimality Theory is a linguistic model proposing that the observed forms of language arise from the optimal satisfaction of conflicting constraints. OT differs from other approaches to phonological analysis, which typically use rules rather than constraints. However, phonological models of representation, such as autosegmental phonology, prosodic phonology, and linear phonology (SPE), are equally compatible with rule-based and constraint-based models. OT views grammars as systems that provide mappings from inputs to outputs; typically, the inputs are conceived of as underlying representations, and the outputs as their surface realizations. It is an approach within the larger framework of generative grammar.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Keren Rice</span> Canadian linguist

Keren D. Rice is a Canadian linguist. She is a professor of linguistics and serves as the Director of the Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives at the University of Toronto.

Heather Goad is a Canadian linguist. Her research explores areas of phonology and language acquisition, especially investigating the shapes of phonological systems, including contrasts in English, French, Korean, Portuguese, Italian and Nepali, as well as the developmental paths of acquiring speech sounds by first and second language learners.

Ellen Broselow is an experimental linguist specializing in second language acquisition and phonology. Since 1983, she has been on the faculty of SUNY Stony Brook University, where she has held the position of Professor of Linguistics since 1993.

Donca Steriade is a professor of Linguistics at MIT, specializing in phonological theory.

Monik Charette is a French-Canadian linguist and phonologist who taught at SOAS the University of London, in the United Kingdom. She specializes in phonology, morphophonology, stress systems, vowel harmony, syllabic structure and word-structure, focusing on Altaic languages, Turkish, and French.

Proto-Karenic or Proto-Karen is the reconstructed ancestor of the Karenic languages.

References

  1. "Phonology in the 21st Century: In Honour of Glyne Piggott". Linguist List. December 1, 2010. Archived from the original on April 2, 2015. Retrieved March 28, 2015.
  2. Piggott, Glyne (January 1991). "Apocope and the Licensing of Empty-Headed Syllables". The Linguistic Review. doi:10.1515/tlir.1991.8.2-4.287 . Retrieved March 28, 2015.
  3. "Editorial Information". The Linguistic Review. De Gruyter. Retrieved March 28, 2015.
  4. "Calls: Phonology/UK; Comp Ling,Hist Ling,Phonology/Czech Republic". Linguist List. January 26, 2007. Retrieved March 28, 2015.
  5. "Report of the Academic Program Review Panel on the Department of Linguistics, Memorial University" (PDF). January 8, 2009. Retrieved March 28, 2015.
  6. Fanfair, Ron (May 28, 2014). "Education in Caribbean should be guaranteed — Prof". Share News. Retrieved March 28, 2015.
  7. "About Us". Superkutz Scholarship Foundation. Retrieved March 28, 2015.
  8. "The Administration". The Quebec Black Medical Association. March 22, 2015. Retrieved March 28, 2015.

Bibliography