Syntactic Pathways to Morphology (SPTM) is a monthly online lecture series hosted by the Department of Linguistics at the University of São Paulo, bringing together researchers working on the morphology-syntax interface, with a particular f…
Syntactic Pathways to Morphology (SPTM) is a monthly online lecture series hosted by the Department of Linguistics at the University of São Paulo, bringing together researchers working on the morphology-syntax interface, with a particular f…
From June 1 to August 1, I was in Togo to do fieldwork on Kpelegbe, a dialect of Ewe spoken in Togo. This was my second year of fielwork on Kpelegbe. The following numbers give an overview of what I have accomplished. A summary for the summ…
We left the village at around 11:00am Sunday, and raced back to Lome, our driver honking his way around motorcycles and other cars. We sped along making great time. But then, about halfway to Lome, our car broke down (picture posted).Luckil…
Since the 90s, there are been many changes to village life.In the 90s, people got their water from the stream, mostly through the hard labor of young girls who carried all the water in buckets on their heads. As you can imagine, this proces…
Why am I investing so much time and effort in a Kpelegbe dictionary? In this post, I will outline some of the uses of the Kpelegbe dictionary that I am currently in Togo working on. My current goal is to produce a dictionary of around 3,000…
Ghanaian versus Togolese EweAbstractBased on a survey of some Ghanaian and Togolese dialects of Ewe, this paper shows that there are features that distinguish dialects of Ewe spoken in Ghana from dialects of Ewe spoken in Togo. These featur…
I have discovered a magical phrase that increases my ability to learn Ewe in the field by at least 100%. It took me years to discover these magic words, so pay attention.In Togo, the assumption that Togolese make in starting a conversation
On Tuesday, disaster struck. The day started auspiciously enough. I had the brilliant idea to use my iPhone 16 to record some videos in the field. I had already recorded the audio of some songs from one of my groups, so my plan was to rerec…
The other night I was sitting around at night with my sister-in-law and my consultant. I had just listed to the Radio Lome news broadcast, so it was around 7:15pm. My sister-in-law prepared a meal of corn porridge (pate in French, akple in
In this blog post, I walk through the steps that I have been following in capturing lexical items for the Kpelegbe dictionary.1. FindingThere are many different sources for lexical items. The only constraint is your imagination. There shoul…
Here is a summary (by the numbers) of my first two weeks of being in the field doing work on the Kpelegbe dictionary.Dates: 6/10-6/19Consultants: 7 (2 men, 4 women)Teams: 3Days: 9New lexical items: 191Sound files: 1,131New songs: 9These fir…