Juliette Blevins | |
---|---|
Nationality | American |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Linguistics |
Website | http://julietteblevins.ws.gc.cuny.edu/ |
Juliette Blevins (born 1960) is an American linguist whose work has contributed to the fields of phonology, phonetics, historical linguistics, and typology. She is currently professor of linguistics at the Graduate Center, CUNY. [1]
Blevins received her PhD in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985. [2] [3]
She worked as the senior research scientist at the department of linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig from 2004-2010. She has also worked as a professor at University of California, Berkeley, University of Luton, University of Western Australia, and University of Texas at Austin before joining the faculty of CUNY in 2010. [4]
Blevins's research spans several sub-disciplines and features Austronesian, Australian Aboriginal, Andamanese, Native American languages, [5] and more recently Basque. [6] She is the founder of the approach of Evolutionary phonology. [7] This approach seeks to explain the cross-linguistic similarity of sound patterns by examining the regular processes of sound change. This approach argues that many common sound patterns in contemporary phonologies are not necessarily reflections of underlying universal properties of languages, but rather the result of sound changes that are guided by the common tendencies of language transmission. [7]
In 2001, Blevins published a sketch grammar of Nhanda, based on her work with the last remaining speakers.
In 2020, Blevins was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. [8]
She is the director of the Endangered Language Initiative, [9] co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, [2] and a co-founder of the Yurok Language Project. [10]
Functional linguistics is an approach to the study of language characterized by taking systematically into account the speaker's and the hearer's side, and the communicative needs of the speaker and of the given language community. Linguistic functionalism spawned in the 1920s to 1930s from Ferdinand de Saussure's systematic structuralist approach to language (1916).
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:
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian-American linguist and literary theorist.
Linguistic typology is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the common properties of the world's languages. Its subdisciplines include, but are not limited to phonological typology, which deals with sound features; syntactic typology, which deals with word order and form; lexical typology, which deals with language vocabulary; and theoretical typology, which aims to explain the universal tendencies.
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists tend to share certain working assumptions such as the competence-performance distinction and the notion that some domain-specific aspects of grammar are partly innate. These assumptions are rejected in non-generative approaches such as usage-based models of language. Generative linguistics includes work in core areas such as syntax, semantics, phonology, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition, with additional extensions to topics including biolinguistics and music cognition.
The Andamanese languages are the various languages spoken by the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. There are two known Andamanese language families, Great Andamanese and Ongan, as well as two presumed but unattested languages, Sentinelese and Jangil.
A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel /ɑ̃/ or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are produced without nasalization.
Robert Malcolm Ward "Bob" Dixon is a Professor of Linguistics in the College of Arts, Society, and Education and The Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Queensland. He is also Deputy Director of The Language and Culture Research Centre at JCU. Doctor of Letters, he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters Honoris Causa by JCU in 2018. Fellow of British Academy; Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and Honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America, he is one of three living linguists to be specifically mentioned in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics by Peter Matthews (2014).
Nhanda, also rendered Nanda, Nhanta and Nhandi, is an Australian Aboriginal language from the Midwest region of Western Australia, between Geraldton and the Murchison River, from the coast to about 20 kilometres (12 mi) inland. The language is now spoken, or semi-spoken, by only a few people.
Larry M. Hyman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in phonology and has particular interest in African languages.
Ongan, also called Angan, South Andamanese or Jarawa–Onge, is a phylum which comprises two attested Andamanese languages spoken in the southern Andaman Islands.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguistics is based on a theoretical as well as a descriptive study of language and is also interlinked with the applied fields of language studies and language learning, which entails the study of specific languages. Before the 20th century, linguistics evolved in conjunction with literary study and did not employ scientific methods. Modern-day linguistics is considered a science because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language – i.e., the cognitive, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the biological, the literary, the grammatical, the paleographical, and the structural.
Rupert Gerritsen was an Australian historian and a noted authority on Indigenous Australian prehistory. Coupled with his work on early Australian cartography, he played an influential part in re-charting Australian history prior to its settlement by the British in 1788, and noted evidence of agriculture and settlements on the continent before the arrival of settlers.
Djinang is an Australian Aboriginal language, one of the family of Yolŋu languages which are spoken in the north-east Arnhem Land region of the Northern Territory.
Palantla Chinantec, also known as Chinanteco de San Pedro Tlatepuzco, is a major Chinantecan language of Mexico, spoken in San Juan Palantla and a couple dozen neighboring towns in northern Oaxaca. The variety of San Mateo Yetla, known as Valle Nacional Chinantec, has marginal mutual intelligibility.
Panchronic phonology is an approach to historical phonology. Its aim is to formulate generalizations about sound changes that are independent of any particular language or language group.
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.
Evolutionary Phonology is an approach to phonology and historical linguistics, based on the idea that recurrent synchronic sound patterns, if not inherited from the mother tongue, are the result of recurrent sound changes, while rare patterns are the product of rare changes or a combination of independent changes.
The usage-based linguistics is a linguistics approach within a broader functional/cognitive framework, that emerged since the late 1980s, and that assumes a profound relation between linguistic structure and usage. It challenges the dominant focus, in 20th century linguistics, on considering language as an isolated system removed from its use in human interaction and human cognition. Rather, usage-based models posit that linguistic information is expressed via context-sensitive mental processing and mental representations, which have the cognitive ability to succinctly account for the complexity of actual language use at all levels. Broadly speaking, a usage-based model of language accounts for language acquisition and processing, synchronic and diachronic patterns, and both low-level and high-level structure in language, by looking at actual language use.