Sarah Murray

It's been three and a half years since I worked for The LINGUIST List. Since then, I've moved to New Jersey to pursue my Ph.D in Linguistics with a Certificate in Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. I'm now in my fourth year of that program, focusing on formal semantics and fieldwork.

Two years ago, I began researching Cheyenne, an endangered Algonquian language spoken in Montana and Oklahoma. I studied existing documentation (a grammar, a dictionary, and texts) and found myself wanting to study certain unique features of Cheyenne in detail. In the summer of 2006, I began my own fieldwork on Cheyenne with a two-week pilot study on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana, funded by a Phillips fund Grant for Native American Research from the American Philosophical Society. I met many members of the community, glossed three previously recorded stories, formated them for use as teaching materials, and began research on evidentiality and reflexivity/reciprocity in Cheyenne. In the summer of 2007, I returned for six weeks, funded by a linguistic fieldwork grant from the Endangered Language Fund. Continuing and expanding my research, I worked with several new consultants, verified data, elicited new material, made hours of recordings, and glossed ten additional texts. This coming summer, I plan to return for in-depth research on the semantics of evidentiality and to continue making language materials.

This past year, I completed my second Qualifying Paper ("Reflexivity and Reciprocity: From English to Cheyenne"), a formal account of reflexives and reciprocal anaphors in English and the reflexive/reciprocal affix in Cheyenne. Based on Cheyenne data collected during my fieldwork, I argue that the reflexive/reciprocal Cheyenne affix is underspecified, not ambiguous. I presented extensions of this work at two international semantics conferences: Sinn und Bedeutung 12 at the University of Oslo ("Reflexivity and Reciprocity with(out) Underspecification") and the Sixteenth Amsterdam Colloquim at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation in Amsterdam ("Dynamics of Reflexivity and Reciprocity").

Currently, I'm working on my dissertation proposal and will defend it this semester to my committee (Maria Bittner (Advisor), Roger Schwarzschild, and Matthew Stone). In my dissertation, I investigate the semantics and pragmatics of evidentiality in Cheyenne discourse based on data collected in the field. Cheyenne has a rich system of grammaticalized evidential markers which have never before been studied in detail. Preliminary fieldwork suggests that these markers are morphologically related to questions and negation in Cheyenne, and that they interact in illustrative ways with certain discourse phenomena. The goal of the dissertation is in-depth documentation and formal semantic analysis of evidentials in Cheyenne discourse.

During my time at the LINGUIST List, I worked as the Jobs and Support Editor, the Managing Editor, a researcher, a programmer, and a website designer, among other things. I was also able to participate in E-MELD, working on the School of Best Practice and attending two of the annual workshops. In addition to exposing me to topics such as endangered languages and language documentation, The LINGUIST List provided me with essential support during my fourth and fifth years at Wayne State University while I completed my BA in Linguistics and Philosophy (2003) and my MA in Linguistics (2004). During these years, I took courses which laid the groundwork for my current research, such as field methods and advanced logic. I will always be grateful to the LINGUIST List, and to the community who supports it, for helping to shape my interests in this field.


Sincerely,

-Sarah Murray
http://rci.rutgers.edu/~semurray

See Sarah's LL personal page while she was a crew member!