Laura J. Downing

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Laura J. Downing (born 1954, Mitchel AFB, New York) is an American linguist, specializing in the phonology of African languages.

Contents

Education and career

Downing earned her B.S. in linguistics from Georgetown University in 1977, and her PhD in linguistics from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 1990. [1] Her dissertation, The tonal phonology of Jita , was published by Lincom Europa in 1996. After receiving her PhD, she held several positions in North America before moving to Europe in 2001. She was a senior researcher at the ZAS (Center for General Linguistics) in Berlin from 2001 to 2012, [2] and was professor of African Languages at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, from 2012 until her retirement in 2021. [3] [4] [5]

Research

Downing's research centers on the formal analysis of the prosody of Bantu languages, including prosodic morphology, lexical and grammatical tone systems, information structure and phrasal prosody. [6] Her research has contributed to a better understanding of the prosodic and morphological constraints on reduplication, especially in Bantu languages (Downing 2006). Her work with Lisa Cheng on the phonology-syntax interface, in particular in Zulu, shows the close interaction between the prosodic phrasings of a language and the syntactic structure within the Minimalist framework (Cheng & Downing 2009, 2016). Fieldwork over many years in Malawi in collaboration with Al Mtenje led to them co-authoring The Phonology of Chichewa (Downing & Mtenje 2017). [7] [8]

Downing was also involved in international collaborative projects funded by leading funding agencies. She co-directed, with Annie Rialland, a French-German ANR-DFG project, BANTUPSYN, devoted to the Phonology-syntax Interface in Bantu languages (2009–2012). [9] [10] This project led to a co-edited volume on Intonation in African tone languages (Downing & Rialland, eds., 2017). [11] With Maarten Mous (Leiden University) and Morgan Nilsson (U of Gothenburg), she led a VR project investigating Somali prosody from 2016 to 2019. [12]

Honors and distinctions

Publications

Books

Laura J. Downing. 1996. The tonal phonology of Jita .  LINCOM Studies in African Linguistics 05.  Munich:  LINCOM EUROPA.  [revised version, dissertation]. 245 pp. ISBN   978-3-89586-032-4

Laura J. Downing. 2006. Canonical Forms in Prosodic Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 284 pp.  ISBN   978-0-19-928639-3 doi : 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199286393.001.0001

Laura J. Downing and Al Mtenje. 2017. The Phonology of Chichewa . Phonology of the World's Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0-19-872474-2 doi : 10.1093/oso/9780198724742.001.0001

Laura J. Downing and Annie Rialland, eds. 2017. Intonation in African Tone Languages. Phonology & Phonetics 24. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN   978-3-11-048479-3

Selected other publications

Lisa L.-S. Cheng and Laura J. Downing. 2009. Where's the topic in Zulu? In Helen de Hoop & Geertje van Bergen (eds.), Topics Cross-linguistically. Special issue, The Linguistic Review 26, 2/3: 207–238. doi : 10.1515/tlir.2009.008

Laura J. Downing and Larry M. Hyman. 2016. Information Structure in Bantu Languages. In Caroline Féry & Shinichiro Ishihara (eds.), Handbook of Information Structure . Oxford University Press, 790–813. doi : 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199642670.013.010

Lisa L.-S. Cheng and Laura J. Downing. 2016. Phasal syntax = cyclic phonology? Syntax 19 (2), 159–191. doi : 10.1111/synt.12120

Related Research Articles

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 now it may relate to any linguistic analysis either:

A pitch-accent language is a type of language that, when spoken, has certain syllables in words or morphemes that are prominent, as indicated by a distinct contrasting pitch rather than by loudness or length, as in some other languages like English. Pitch-accent languages also contrast with fully tonal languages like Vietnamese, Thai and Standard Chinese, in which practically every syllable can have an independent tone. Some scholars have claimed that the term "pitch accent" is not coherently defined and that pitch-accent languages are just a sub-category of tonal languages in general.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chewa language</span> Bantu language of Southern and East Africa

Chewa is a Bantu language spoken in Malawi and a recognised minority in Zambia and Mozambique. The noun class prefix chi- is used for languages, so the language is usually called Chichewa and Chinyanja. In Malawi, the name was officially changed from Chinyanja to Chichewa in 1968 at the insistence of President Hastings Kamuzu Banda, and this is still the name most commonly used in Malawi today. In Zambia, the language is generally known as Nyanja or Cinyanja/Chinyanja '(language) of the lake'.

Tumbuka is a Bantu language which is spoken in Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania. It is also known as Chitumbuka or Citumbuka — the chi- prefix in front of Tumbuka means "in the manner of", and is understood in this case to mean "the language of the Tumbuka people". Tumbuka belongs to the same language group Chewa and Sena.

Meeussen's rule is a special case of tone reduction. It was first described in Bantu languages, but occurs in analyses of other languages as well, such as Papuan languages. The tonal alternation it describes is the lowering, in some contexts, of the last tone of a pattern of two adjacent High tones (HH), resulting in the pattern HL. The phenomenon is named after its first observer, the Belgian Bantu specialist A. E. Meeussen (1912–1978). In phonological terms, the phenomenon can be seen as a special case of the Obligatory Contour Principle.

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.

Downstep is a phenomenon in tone languages in which if two syllables have the same tone, the second syllable is lower in pitch than the first.

Mary Esther Beckman is a Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the Ohio State University.

Ndali, or Chindali, is a Bantu language spoken by an increasing population in southern Tanzania of 150,000 (1987) and in northern Malawi by 70,000 (2003).

Malawi Lomwe, known as Elhomwe, is a dialect of the Lomwe language spoken in southeastern Malawi in parts such as Mulanje and Thyolo.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jita language</span> Bantu language of Tanzania

Jita is a Bantu language of Tanzania, spoken on the southeastern shore of Lake Victoria/Nyanza and on the island of Ukerewe.

Chichewa is the main language spoken in south and central Malawi, and to a lesser extent in Zambia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Like most other Bantu languages, it is tonal; that is to say, pitch patterns are an important part of the pronunciation of words. Thus, for example, the word chímanga (high-low-low) 'maize' can be distinguished from chinangwá (low-low-high) 'cassava' not only by its consonants but also by its pitch pattern. These patterns remain constant in whatever context the nouns are used.

Elisabeth O. Selkirk is a theoretical linguist specializing in phonological theory and the syntax-phonology interface. She is currently a professor emerita in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Francis Moto</span> Malawian writer, academic, and diplomat

Professor Francis P. B. Moto is a Malawian writer, academic, and diplomat. His home is Golomoti in the Dedza District of Malawi. He attended secondary school in Chichiri in Blantyre and was admitted to the University of Malawi in 1972, obtaining a degree in linguistics in 1977.

Megan Jane Crowhurst is an Australian- and Canadian-raised linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States.

Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng is a linguist with specialisation in theoretical syntax. She is a Chair Professor of Linguistics and Language at the Department of Linguistics, Leiden University, and one of the founding members of the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jason Kandybowicz</span> American linguist (born 1978)

Jason Kandybowicz is an American linguist, since 2022 Full Professor of Linguistics at The CUNY Graduate Center. He received his Ph.D. from University of California, Los Angeles in 2006 as an advisee of Hilda Koopman. Kandybowicz has researched several endangered and understudied West African languages, including Nupe, Krachi, Ikpana and Asante Twi. Working within the generative grammar framework, he has written several important books and scientific journal articles about Niger-Congo languages and the syntax-phonology interface. He has made a number of media appearances, including interviews for podcasts and the British Broadcasting Company

Annie Rialland is a French linguist who is Director of Research emerita of the CNRS Laboratory of Phonetics and Phonology (Paris). Her main domains of expertise are phonetics, phonology, prosody, and African languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diane Brentari</span> American linguist

Diane Brentari is an American linguist who specializes in sign languages and American Sign Language in particular.

Alfred (“Al”) D. Mtenje is a professor of Linguistics at the University of Malawi. He is known for his work on the prosody of Malawian Bantu languages, as well as for his work in support of language policies promoting the native languages of Malawi.

References

  1. ↑ "University of Illinois Ph.D. Recipients in Linguistics | Linguistics at Illinois". linguistics.illinois.edu. Retrieved 2022-03-12.
  2. ↑ "ZAS Berlin: PB4". www.leibniz-zas.de. Retrieved 2022-03-12.
  3. ↑ "Laura Downing | University of Gothenburg". www.gu.se. Retrieved 2022-03-12.
  4. ↑ "GU Journalen 3-2015 by University of Gothenburg - Issuu". issuu.com. 12 May 2015. Retrieved 2022-03-12.
  5. ↑ "GU-Journal no 1 2013 by University of Gothenburg - Issuu". issuu.com. 13 February 2013. Retrieved 2022-03-12.
  6. ↑ "Laura J. Downing". scholar.google.de. Retrieved 2022-03-12.
  7. ↑ Marlo, Michael R.; Frost, Joshua; Kujath, Elizabeth; Lawlor, Cara; Pribe, Sarah; Raney, Emily; Skrivan, Patrick; Thein, Alexa (2018). "The phonology of Chichewa by Laura J. Downing and Al Mtenje". Language. 94 (3): 714–717. doi:10.1353/lan.2018.0042. ISSN   1535-0665. S2CID   149490714.
  8. ↑ Franich, Kathryn (2018). "Laura J. Downing and Al Mtenje (2018). The phonology of Chichewa. (The Phonology of the World's Languages.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. xvi+294". Phonology. 35 (3): 537–543. doi:10.1017/S0952675718000167. ISSN   0952-6757. S2CID   70125906.
  9. ↑ "ZAS Berlin: SynPhonI". www.leibniz-zas.de. Retrieved 2022-03-12.
  10. ↑ Lacombe, Stephanie. "Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3 - ANR - BANTUPSYN". www.univ-paris3.fr (in French). Retrieved 2022-03-12.
  11. ↑ Snider, Keith L. (2018). "Book review". Lingua. 204: 16–20. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2017.10.008.
  12. ↑ "Somaliska språket och prosodisk typologi | Göteborgs universitet". www.gu.se (in Swedish). Retrieved 2022-03-12.
  13. ↑ "LSA Elects Three to Honorary Membership | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved 2022-03-12.
  14. ↑ "Past officers | ACAL" . Retrieved 2022-03-12.
  15. ↑ "Kungl. Vetenskaps- och Vitterhets-Samhället i Göteborg (KVVS) | Ledamöter" (in Swedish). Retrieved 2022-03-12.
  16. ↑ "Prof. Laura J. Downing - AcademiaNet". www.academia-net.org. Retrieved 2022-03-12.
  17. ↑ "LSA Elects Three to Honorary Membership | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved 2022-03-12.
  18. ↑ "Crossing boundaries: a Festchrift for Laura Downing; Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus". spilplus.journals.ac.za. Retrieved 2022-03-12.
  19. ↑ "Vol. 62 No. 2 (2022): Crossing boundaries: a Festchrift for Laura Downing (part 2) Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus". spilplus.journals.ac.za. Retrieved 2022-06-21.
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