Tucker Childs

Professor of Applied Linguistics

Teaching Interests

• Phonetics
• Phonology
• Sociolinguistics
• Language Variation and Change
• Dialectology
• Pidgins and Creoles
• African Languages
• Language Typology
• Field Methods
• Language Endangerment

Courses Taught

• Phonetics
• Phonology
• Sociolinguistics
• Introduction to Language and Society
• Historical and Comparative Linguistics
• Pidgins and Creoles
• Topic: Black English (African American Vernacular English - AAVE)
• Topic: Field Methods
• Topic: Language Contact
• Topic: Language Variation
• Topic: Language and Gender
• Topic: Language Endangerment
• Topic: Language Typology

Research Interests

• Prosody, especially (African) tone
• Expressive language and non-core grammar
• Field methods and methodology in general
• Language contact
• Language variation and change, dialectology
• African languages

Research Projects

• Mani Documentation Project (2004-2006)
• Documenting Krim and Bom (2008-2010)
• Portland Dialect Study
• Kisi proverbs
• “Documenting dying languages in West Africa”, talk given as part of the Berglund Round Table Series, University of the Pacific: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJw6j5zkYBM

Contact

• childst@pdx.edu

Representative Publications

• 2009. Language contact in Africa, a selected review. Handbook of Language Contact. R. Hickey. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK, Blackwell Publishers: 1-20.
• 2007. Let’s speak Mani! / Parlons mani ! Portland, OR: Real Estate Publishers, Inc. (Distributed to speech communities in Guinea and Sierra Leone, April 2009.)
• 2004. The S-AUX-O-V syntagm in the Atlantic languages. Studies in African Linguistics 33:1-41.
• 2003b. An Introduction to African Languages. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, USA: John Benjamins.
• 2001. “Research on ideophones, whither hence?: The need for a social theory of ideophones”. In Ideophones, Voeltz, F. K. Erhard and Christa Kilian-Hatz (eds.), 63–73.
• 1997. “The status of Isicamtho, an Nguni-based urban variety of Soweto”. In The Structure and Status of Pidgins and Creoles, Spears, Arthur K. and Donald Winford (eds.), 341 ff.
• 1994. “Expressiveness in contact situations: The fate of African ideophones”. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 9:2, 257 ff.