Daniel W. Hieber

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Linguist at Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana

Nisinoon is an NSF-funded cross-linguistic database of the components which make up words in Algonquian languages. There are two main goals: 1) To provide tribes with a source for lexical expansion for their language revitalization/reclamation projects. 2) To provide a basis for comprehensive reconstruction of Proto-Algonquian. This database is a...

Variation and inconsistency within endangered languages are often attributed to language obsolescence, explained either by influence due to contact or by imperfect / incomplete acquisition. Much of this variation, however, can also be understood as the result of natural processes of diachronic change. Language obsolescence is often a convenient sca...

Virtual poster presentation given at the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) 2022 Annual Meeting, held in hybrid format in Washington, D.C.

Lexical polyfunctionality in discourse: A quantitative corpus-based approach

Invited lecture (virtual), 'Language Revitalization', Prof. Jordan Lachler, Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta, November 18, 2020.

This talk presents the results of a quantitative corpus-based investigation into lexical flexibility in Nuuchahnulth (Wakashan) and English (Indo-European). Lexical flexibility (also called conversion, functional shift, heterosemy, polycategoriality, zero derivation, and many other terms) is when a lexical item is used for more than one discourse f...

Invited lecture (virtual). 'Morphosyntax', Prof. Robert Englebretson, Department of Linguistics, Rice University, November 6, 2020.

This chapter is a survey of word classes in indigenous North American languages, with the aim of providing an introduction to the study of parts of speech, and of highlighting the unique place and contribution of North American indigenous languages in this research. Section 2 defines lexical vs. grammatical and open vs. closed classes, and how thes...

Preprint of a chapter for The languages and linguistics of indigenous North America: A comprehensive guide, eds. Carmen Jany, Keren Rice, & Marianne Mithun.

This talk presents preliminary results from my dissertation research on lexical flexibility (the ability for words to be used in multiple parts of speech like noun, verb, and adjective), focusing on data in English.

The history of the Chitimacha language is a remarkable story of cultural survival. This chapter tells a part of that story, discussing the interactions between Chitimacha and other languages in the Southeast prior to colonial contact, the persecution of the Chitimacha people under the French, the language’s documentation by early linguists and anth...

This paper describes the alignment system for verbal person-marking in Chitimacha, a language isolate of Louisiana. Using data from recently digitized versions of texts collected by Morris Swadesh in the 1930s, I show that Chitimacha exhibits a split alignment system with agent-patient alignment in the first person and nominative-accusative alignme...

A common need among Algonquian language revitalization programs, especially those with no or few first-language speakers, is novel vocabulary. This paper describes a web-based, open-access comparative database of Algonquian derivational morphemes, now in its pilot phase. We have two main goals: to provide tribes with a source for novel word creatio...

Best practices in Digital Linguistics for language documentation. Slides available at https://slides.com/dwhieb/digital-linguistics-for-language-documentation.

This talk describes an optional subject (nominative) marker in Chitimacha, a language isolate in Louisiana. This marker is especially interesting because it shares its form with numerous other functions, each of which is diachronically related but synchronically distinct, related as part of a polygrammaticalization chain. This marker is also intere...

This talk presents the first analysis of grammatical relations in noun phrases in Chitimacha. Previous grammatical descriptions of the language treat Chitimacha noun phrases as uninflected for case (Swanton 1920; Swadesh 1946:319), yet describe various “postpositions” which sound suspiciously like markers of grammatical relations. For example, Swad...

This talk presents the first analysis of grammatical relations in noun phrases in Chitimacha (Glottolog: chit1248, ISO 639-3: ctm; isolate, Louisiana). Previous grammatical descriptions of the language treat Chitimacha noun phrases as uninflected for case (Swanton 1920; Swadesh 1946:319), yet describe various “postpositions” which sound suspiciousl...

Chitimacha is a language isolate formerly spoken in southern Louisiana, and is a part of the Southeast linguistic area. Using documentary materials recorded by Morris Swadesh in the 1930s, this talk examines the language-internal evidence for the diachrony of three features of Chitimacha grammar: positional auxiliary verbs, switch-reference, and ag...

The genesis of new lexical categories poses a challenge to theories of diachronic change: If there are no pre-existing words in the class to analogize to, how does the category arise? This paper shows that a constructional approach to category change successfully accounts for the genesis of a diverse class of preverbs in Chitimacha, an isolate of t...

Within historical linguistics, language isolates are often viewed as a problem. Their isolate status makes it difficult to peer into their history, and internal reconstruction is generally thought to be of limited utility. Campbell (2013:170–172) briefly discusses how historical linguists might productively gain insights into the diachrony of langu...

Though valency has long been of interest to linguists, there are relatively few surveys of valency classes from a crosslinguistic perspective (Dixon & Aikhenvald 2000a; Kulikov, Malchukov & de Swart 2006; Malchukov & Comrie 2015; Tsunoda & Kageyama 2006). A minority but persistent perspective that appears in valency research, however, is the sugges...

It is well known that the act of invoking a genre is fundamentally one of social action: speakers perform texts with specific social ends in mind, drawing on intertextual connections to imbue their performance with social meaning (Basso, 1996; Bauman, 2004; Briggs & Bauman, 1992; Hodges, 2015). But when a particular genre consists of or includes mu...

It is well known that the act of invoking a genre is fundamentally one of social action: speakers perform texts with specific social ends in mind, drawing on intertextual connections to imbue their performance with social meaning (Basso, 1996; Bauman, 2004; Briggs & Bauman, 1992; Hodges, 2015). But when a particular genre consists of or includes mu...

This talk shows how various prosodic features of Ékegusií (Kisii, Great Lakes Bantu; Kenya) narratives function to create discourse cohesion, by signaling the transitions from one unit of discourse to the next, the relations that hold between those units, and their relative prominence. I demonstrate that these prosodic features – pause, vowel elisi...

Talk presented at the Language, Interaction, & Social Organization Symposium (LISO) special session on Interaction & Culture Across Languages: Perspectives from Field Linguistics, April 8, 2016, University of California, Santa Barbara.

This thesis aims to advance the idea that prosody is fundamentally about creating cohesion, that is, signaling the “relations of meaning that exist within the text” (Halliday & Hasan 1976:4). Building on research on the cohesive function of prosody by Wichmann (2000) and Wennerstrom (2001), I show how each of the features generally referred to as p...

Markers of grammatical dependency frequently undergo changes in domain or scope, whether these changes occur at the level of local morphology, clausal syntax, interclausal syntax, or discourse. In Chitimacha, a Louisiana isolate documented by Morris Swadesh in the 1930s, the diachronic continuum of scopal changes from morphology to discourse can be...

https://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-542.html

Talk presented at the University of California's Grad Slam competition for the best 3-minute research talk by a graduate student. 1st place, University of California, Santa Barbara Finals (April 17) 2nd place, University of California Grand Finals (May 4) Watch online: https://youtu.be/Md7Wku6nGoE

This paper aims to describe the semantic features conditioning an alternation between two related but behaviorally-distinct negation constructions in Chitimacha, an isolate language of the Southeast U.S. linguistic area. These constructions are interesting in the study of Chitimacha grammar and the Southeast generally because the two constructions...

Language Documentation & Conservation

Term paper, ‘Advanced Syntax’, Prof. Marianne Mithun, Fall 2014, UC Santa Barbara.

Talk presented at the UC Santa Barbara 25 th Anniversary Reunion

Just as language endangerment involves a reduction in the domains of language use, language revitalization involves an expansion of the language into new (or previous) domains. Yet while all language revitalization efforts face the task of augmenting the lexicon to accommodate these new domains, very little guidance or training is available to comm...

Brown, Wichmann & Beck (2014) put forward 90 cognate sets and a number of structural comparisons which they propose are indicative of a genetic relationship between Chitimacha, a Gulf isolate of Louisiana, and Proto-Totozoquean, the authors’ reconstruction of the common ancestor of the Tepehua, Totonac, Mixe, and Zoque language groups of Mesoameric...

It is well known that grammaticalization (whereby lexical items develop into grammatical ones; Meillet 1912; Hopper & Traugott 2003:2) is a composite phenomenon, consisting of a number of micro-level changes that give rise to broader patterns (Lehmann 2002:108–153; Norde 2009:120). While a form might exhibit a high degree of grammaticalization in t...

Term paper, 'Languages in contact’, Prof. Marianne Mithun, Winter 2014, UC Santa Barbara.

This paper seeks to determine the system of grammatical relations for verbal person marking in Chitimacha, a once-extinct isolate from Louisiana now undergoing revitalization efforts. Though the language was documented intermittently from 1802 onwards, the most extensive and reliable documentation is from Morris Swadesh's work with the last two nat...

https://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-4963.html

A review of R.M.W. Dixon's Basic Linguistic Theory and I am a Linguist.

http://elanguage.net/blogs/booknotices/?p=2525

https://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-2550.html

This paper examines the sociocultural construct of primitivism as used in the academic discourse of linguists in the Americanist tradition from Franz Boas onwards. Boas was the first to problematize the concept of 'primitive' when applied to languages, races, or cultures, sparking a discourse that eventually resulted in the practice among linguists...

Talk presented to the class Linguistic Anthropology, taught by Prof. Amy Paugh, James Madison University

Keynote

https://linguistlist.org/issues/23/23-2390.html

Talk presented to the Modern Languages Department, College of William & Mary.

https://linguistlist.org/issues/22/22-3129.html

Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Symposium

https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/booknotices/?p=1510

Elicitation techniques. Invited talk, Content Development Department, Rosetta Stone.

https://linguistlist.org/issues/21/21-4069.html

https://linguistlist.org/issues/20/20-2673.html