Berkeley Summer Grant, pt. II
Yip dii doo! I just found out I received the Berkeley Graduate Division Summer Grant! My teachers tell me that the selection process and criteria are a mystery but I think, in my case, impressing upon the committee how important this research is to getting me out of here was a big help.
I'm posting a copy of my essay in case it helps other linguists craft applications that gets more funding for fieldwork since I had no models to work with when I wrote mine, but wished I did.
Graduate Division Summer Grant 2005 – Statement of Purpose
Linguistics Fieldwork on the Mafa of Cameroon
The purpose of my application for the Graduate Division Summer Grant is to seek funding to conduct linguistic fieldwork on Mafa, an Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Cameroon. The speakers of Mafa, also called Mofo and Matakan, number approximately 100,000 and inhabit the Mandara mountains near Lake Chad. There is currently one set of published materials, by Daniel Barreteau and Yves Le Bléis, that provide a basic dictionary of the language based on fieldwork they conducted in 1982 and while this has been indispensable to my current research, there are significant gaps that have prevented me from progressing further. A select set of phenomena in the language appear to challenge current hypotheses about vowel and consonant harmony within the Linguistic sub-fields of Phonology and Morphology and there are several critical questions that are answerable only through further fieldwork with Mafa speakers.
My current research focuses on vowel- and consonant-harmony systems which appear in languages as diverse as Finnish, Navajo and Turkish and are very prominent in the Semitic and Chadic branches of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Harmony is the phenomenon where the sounds within a given word are made to share a certain articulatory feature, such as all vowels being formed with rounded lips, or all consonants being formed with the tongue tip at the alveolar ridge of the mouth. In particular, I’m interested in the cases where vowel harmony interacts with select consonants and in Mafa I have found some excellent examples. There are a number of grammatical forms in Mafa, including the diminutive for nouns, the imperfective for verbs and the intensive for adjectives, that are formed through making vowels and certain consonants harmonic with respect to palatality. Though these forms are mentioned in existing works, elicitation has not been done on how these forms effect all but a few of the words in the dictionary. Much of my work hinges on what these words sound like and may also be impacted by findings from the closely-related near-by languages of Mokolo, Psikye and Mefele.
I will be able to take advantage of existing research infrastructure in the Mandara mountains as there are currently two groups that are doing linguistic and archaeological fieldwork in the area. A number of ethnographers and archaeologists under Gerhard Muller-Kosack are currently surveying the pre-colonial architecture of the Mafa and the Summer Institute of Linguistics has a number of linguistic fieldworkers studying nearby (but unrelated) languages such as Fulfulde.
Aside from critically furthering my own current research interests, further linguistic data on Mafa will benefit the larger community of linguists interested in consonant and vowel harmony and Chadic linguists. I have presented two papers on Mafa based on the data collected by Barreteau and Le Bléis, one geared towards Chadicists and the other Phonologists, and there was definite interest amongst both. There has been strong support within my department as well, partly due to its distinguished history of training students to do fieldwork, and my aim is to share in that tradition. I am currently writing two qualifying papers, one of which is on Mafa, to advance to candidacy, after which I will start my dissertation research, so this summer is ideal for me to conduct research abroad. The data I hope to collect on Mafa will enable me to expand my qualifying papers into a full dissertation research project.
I'm posting a copy of my essay in case it helps other linguists craft applications that gets more funding for fieldwork since I had no models to work with when I wrote mine, but wished I did.
Graduate Division Summer Grant 2005 – Statement of Purpose
Linguistics Fieldwork on the Mafa of Cameroon
The purpose of my application for the Graduate Division Summer Grant is to seek funding to conduct linguistic fieldwork on Mafa, an Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Cameroon. The speakers of Mafa, also called Mofo and Matakan, number approximately 100,000 and inhabit the Mandara mountains near Lake Chad. There is currently one set of published materials, by Daniel Barreteau and Yves Le Bléis, that provide a basic dictionary of the language based on fieldwork they conducted in 1982 and while this has been indispensable to my current research, there are significant gaps that have prevented me from progressing further. A select set of phenomena in the language appear to challenge current hypotheses about vowel and consonant harmony within the Linguistic sub-fields of Phonology and Morphology and there are several critical questions that are answerable only through further fieldwork with Mafa speakers.
My current research focuses on vowel- and consonant-harmony systems which appear in languages as diverse as Finnish, Navajo and Turkish and are very prominent in the Semitic and Chadic branches of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Harmony is the phenomenon where the sounds within a given word are made to share a certain articulatory feature, such as all vowels being formed with rounded lips, or all consonants being formed with the tongue tip at the alveolar ridge of the mouth. In particular, I’m interested in the cases where vowel harmony interacts with select consonants and in Mafa I have found some excellent examples. There are a number of grammatical forms in Mafa, including the diminutive for nouns, the imperfective for verbs and the intensive for adjectives, that are formed through making vowels and certain consonants harmonic with respect to palatality. Though these forms are mentioned in existing works, elicitation has not been done on how these forms effect all but a few of the words in the dictionary. Much of my work hinges on what these words sound like and may also be impacted by findings from the closely-related near-by languages of Mokolo, Psikye and Mefele.
I will be able to take advantage of existing research infrastructure in the Mandara mountains as there are currently two groups that are doing linguistic and archaeological fieldwork in the area. A number of ethnographers and archaeologists under Gerhard Muller-Kosack are currently surveying the pre-colonial architecture of the Mafa and the Summer Institute of Linguistics has a number of linguistic fieldworkers studying nearby (but unrelated) languages such as Fulfulde.
Aside from critically furthering my own current research interests, further linguistic data on Mafa will benefit the larger community of linguists interested in consonant and vowel harmony and Chadic linguists. I have presented two papers on Mafa based on the data collected by Barreteau and Le Bléis, one geared towards Chadicists and the other Phonologists, and there was definite interest amongst both. There has been strong support within my department as well, partly due to its distinguished history of training students to do fieldwork, and my aim is to share in that tradition. I am currently writing two qualifying papers, one of which is on Mafa, to advance to candidacy, after which I will start my dissertation research, so this summer is ideal for me to conduct research abroad. The data I hope to collect on Mafa will enable me to expand my qualifying papers into a full dissertation research project.
3 Comments:
Congratulations on the grant! And thanks for posting your essay -- quite helpful for the upcoming gen of grad students / ling fieldwork and grant-writing hopefuls (me included).
Interesting stuff.
But can I actually make a job out of studying this kind of linguistics?
And are YOU making a living by doing it?
Indeed, one can find jobs doing linguistics research. The types of jobs vary significantly and I think fieldwork is limited to being within the auspices of either being a grad student or getting a government grant. Whether it's a "living" or not is questionable: as a grad student, I'm far below the poverty line, but ultimately I feel like it's a pretty good deal. I get paid to learn while at the same time u-grads at the University get taught relatively cheaply. I think this is a rare instance where everyone makes out pretty well, though perhaps I’m selling myself a little short.
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