John Victor Singler
Department of Linguistics
New York University
10 Washington Place, #305
New York, NY 10003
Email: john.singler@nyu.edu
Phone: 212-998-7959
Fax: 212-995-4707
Professor of Linguistics (Linguistics)
Ph.D., 1984 University of California (Linguistics); M.A., 1979 University of California (Linguistics); M.A., 1976 London (Africana Studies); A.B., 1969 Dartmouth (History).
My Research Goals:
I am a sociolinguist, a creolist, a variationist, a phonologist, an Africanist, a Caribbeanist.
The unifying question that underlies all my research is this:
How can we learn more about language? I work at answering that question by asking more specific questions, for example:
What constrains variation within competence?
How have universal and substratal factors interacted in the creation of pidgin and creole languages?
What role have social, demographic, and historical factors played in determining the character of particular pidgin and creole languages?
What can the language of the descendants of those African Americans who immigrated to Liberia in the nineteenth century tell us about the African American Vernacular English spoken in the United States today?
I am seeking answers to these questions through a range of projects. In a forthcoming issue of Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, I look at the histories of Martinican and Haitian Creoles as a way to get at the social and demographic factors that bear upon these creoles' genesis and upon creole genesis more generally. In a paper I gave last February at the Berkeley Linguistic Society and in another paper I am giving in January at the Society of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, I draw on Optimality Theory to look at the interaction of the universal and the language-particular in the creation of pidgin/creole phonology. I am also at work examining "verbal -s" in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and in the speech varieties of African American enclave communities elsewhere; my goal is the study of the role of various forces in shaping AAVE,viz. universals, British regional dialects, and AAVE's creole past.
Publications:
In preparation. Black English over yonder: The study of Liberian Settler English. New York: Oxford University Press.
In press. Theories of creole genesis, sociohistorical considerations, and the evaluation of evidence: The case of Haitian Creole and the Relexification Hypothesis. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages. 1996 11.185-230
(1993) The African presence in Caribbean French colonies in the seventeenth century: Documentary evidence. Montreal: Universite du Quebec a Montreal, Traveaux de recherche sur le creole haitien
(1991) Phonology in the basilect: The fate of final consonants in Liberian English. Studies in African Linguistics 22.1-44.
(1990) [edited volume] Pidgin and creole tense-mood-aspect systems (Creole Language Library, 6.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
(1988) The homogeneity of the substrate as a factor in pidgin/creole genesis. Language 64.27-51
Fellowships/Honors: National Science Foundation grant, "An African-American linguistic enclave: The Settler English of Sinoe County, Liberia"; NYU Curricular Development Challenge Fund Grant and New York Council of the Humanities Mini-Grant [with Prof. Bambi B. Schieffelin]; "Language in the City: Perspectives on urban sociolinguistics"; Fulbright U.S. Senior Research Scholar, African Region, "Syntactic innovation in the Liberian English of Monrovia."
Affiliations: President, Society of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics; Co-Editor, Creole Language Library, John Benjamins Publishing Company; Associate Editor, Studies in African Linguistics.
Recent dissertations supervised
Moon, An-Nah [jointly supervised with Katya Zubritskaya]. 1996. Aspects of Old English prosody: An Optimality-Theoretic approach.
Ritter, Nancy A. 1995. The role of Universal Grammar in phonology: A Government Phonology approach to Hungarian. Recipient of NYU's Graduate School of Arts and Science award for the Outstanding Dissertation of the Social Sciences.
Vrzic, Zvjezdana. forthcoming 1997. Toward a theory of creole genesis: Development of creole syntax.
Recent qualifying papers supervised
Akiyama, Makiko. 1996. Punctors in Japanese: A Study of discourse particles across Japanese.
Branchcomb, Sylvia LaRue. 1996. The use of the French negative marker 'ne' in West African French.
Orozco, Rafael. 1996. Distribution of future time forms in Colombian Spanish.
Cummings, Constance. 1995. Adjacency effects in Yoruba nouns.
Delilkan, Ann. 1995. Prefixation and syllabification effects in Malay.
Tsuchihashi, Shoko. 1995. A comparison of American English and Jpanese address in the workplace.
Wedmore, Toby. 1995. Vowel harmony in Brazilian Portuguese.
Last Modified: January 28, 2003