Hot out of the press! Two new publications by Prof. Chris Hammerly! Check below for more.
Citation: Hammerly, C. (2023) A set-based semantics for person, obviation, and animacy. Language, 99(1), 38-80.
Link: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/24/article/884309
Blurb: This paper provides an analysis that ties together three closely linked systems in Ojibwe: person (which distinguishes types of conversational participants), obviation (which makes distinctions based on discourse prominence), and animacy (which makes distinctions based on whether something is living or non-living). I argue that a small set of features denoting first order predicates, when paired with an independently motivated theory of contrast, can capture not only Ojibwe, but also the wider typology of these distinctions across languages. In turn, I show that theories based in feature geometries (e.g. Harley & Ritter 2002) or lattice actions (e.g. Harbour 2016) have limited empirical coverage and/or theoretical shortcomings when animacy and obviation are taken into account.
Citation: Hammerly, C., Frazier, S., Sierra, G., Parkhill, S. Porteous, H. & Quinn, C. (2023) A text-to-speech synthesis system for Border Lakes Ojibwe. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages (ComputEL-6). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Link: https://aclanthology.org/2023.computel-1.9.pdf
Blurb: This paper describes the first ever text-to-speech system for the Ojibwe language. Our team of UBC researchers and software developers from the Victoria-based educational technology start-up CultureFoundry worked with speakers and educators from Treaty #3 territory to create novel training data and a speech synthesis system for use within the Anishinaabemodaa language learning platform.
