Research

My research concerns understanding the relationship of language and traditional ecological knowledge. Linguistic ethnobiology by definition is rooted in the naming of plants and animals. But it's so much more than that. My research has sought to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to name plants and animals by focusing on lexical variation, ethnobiological classification, multilingualism, cognition, and social factors.

 

I love the way ethnobiological knowledge is integrated into language, whether phonologically, grammatically, or lexically. A couple of my favorite examples are the Vute language's semantic extension of ndʒáàb ‘bear fruit’ to also mean ‘pay’ and the extension of óóŋ ‘nest’ as a classifier to indicate closed objects. Another example comes from the Gbaya language, in which the name for a species of caterpillar, dɔ̀k is semantically extended as an adverb dɔ̀ká, meaning 'many', and as an intransitive verb dɔk, meaning 'to be numerous' (Roulon-Doko 2008).

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