Research & Notes
Research updates, field notes, and scholarly discussions.
When I first heard about Dr. McPherson’s niche within the musical side of language, I jumped at the opportunity to collaborate with her. How was there someone out there working at the intersection of ...
I was heading back from Djigouera, a Toussian village of southwest Burkina Faso. We had just picked up Emile and were stopping at a village called Djéri to meet a musician. Both Emile and the musician...
Much of my work on the Sambla balafon surrogate language—and surrogate languages more generally—has focused on the encoding of tone. It is true that this carries the highest functional load in the sur...
One of the primary goals of this project is to develop tools for surrogate language typology. In this post, I’ll introduce a new page in aid of that goal: the Typological Questions page, an informal l...
Senegalese drummers show the practice of playing drums in correlation to speech. These drummers are part of the social class of griots Hale 1998, Tang 2012, and their most common drum is a single-head...
Let’s say in the course of doing fieldwork on a language, you come across a speech surrogate. What do you do? How do you begin to unravel the system and discover its inner workings? As with most of my...
Last December, I took a somewhat unusual data-gathering trip to Accra, Ghana. Rather than targeting a single language, the trip focused on a few of Ghana’s extant surrogate systems. Over the course of...
In this post, I want to talk about enphrasing, a phenomenon of abridging surrogate systems that Stern (1957) defines simply as: ‘the lexical unit is replaced with a phrase’. This phenomenon is atteste...
It may seem like an unusual choice for a linguist to study musical instruments, as if we’re dallying uninvited with the territory of ethnomusicology. However, linguistics is the study of human languag...