Compiled by Chris Collins, Spring 2021
During my Spring 2021 seminar "Structure of Ewe", I started every class with a five minute cultural video. I thought this would help the students get a flavor for Ewe culture, and that might make them more interested in the linguistic structures we were investigating. I repeated the exercise during my Fall 2021 Field Methods course (on Pekigbe, a dialect of Ewe).
Here are the results of my efforts.
This paper gives a preliminary analysis of factive constructions in Kwa languages, including Ewe (Collins 1992), Fon, Yoruba (Bamgbose 1975) and Igbo (Nwachukwu 1976). Differences between the factive constructions of these languages will be analyzed in terms of independent differences.
Here are four N|uu stories recorded and transcribed by me and Levi Namaseb. Each story is written in N|uu, English and Afrikaans. The N|uu orthography is based on an NSF grant with Amanda Miller and Bonny Sands, and is further described in Collins and Namaseb 2011 (available on demand).
(by Katrina Esau)
The Dungbeetles and the Springboks
(by Anna Kassie)
(by Griet Seekoei)
(by Anna Kassie)
A subtitled video can be a great way to share you work with the community you work with and also with linguists. This blog post assumes that you have filmed a video, and that you have transcribed it in ELAN. The goal is to create burned in subtitles for your video using Adobe Premier Pro.
This exercise is appropriate for an advanced undergraduate syntax course (in my case Grammatical Analysis II), or a beginning grad syntax course. The various parts of this exercise serve to bring up various discussion topics.
Sometimes you need a picture of one of your consultants, but you only have video. It is possible to grab a frame from your video to use as a picture. For me, this situation arose because ELAR requests that you provide a picture of each of your consultants, but I did not always take pictures of them.
Here are two pictures of my Peace Corps training group in Togo (1985). I believe we are in Atakpame (maybe one of them is in Lome). During the stage (a French word), we learned French, Ewe and also did a lot of practice teaching. In the Peace Corps, I taught math at the high school level, things like algebra, functions and calculus. We trained the students to take their Bac, which is a super difficult end-of-the-year test covering all the subjects they studied during the year. We were also introduced to Togolese food by the kitchen staff. I still remember eating akple (corn porridge) for the first time and not really liking it. Actually, I never ended up liking it (as opposed to fufu, which I love).
In this paper I will show that quantification into questions (Higginbotham) cannot be replaced by quantification over functions (Engdahl).
A Note on Quantifying into Questions and Functional Readings
