The Joint Program in Linguistics and Anthropology at the University of Arizona

The University of Arizona offers a Ph.D. program in Anthropology and Linguistics. The program makes it possible for students to pursue the study of language and linguistic theory drawing on the resources of both the Linguistics Department and the linguistic anthropology program within the Anthropology Department, without having to go through two separate Ph.D. programs.

Both departments have extremely strong national reputations for their contributions to the study of language, and each department has specialized in mutually compatible ways in the kinds of linguistic theory and analysis it offers students. The Linguistics Department has given priority to formal models of language structure. Linguistic anthropology, as one of the four subdisciplines of anthropology, has concentrated on developing the study of language in its social context, both in sociolinguistics and historical linguistics, with particularly strong links with cultural anthropology. Furthermore, both departments have specialized in Southwestern Native American languages and cultures, a particularly attractive and accessible area of study. Scholars from both departments have also carried out research on numerous other languages.

The joint degree in Anthropology and Linguistics is designed for students with interests in both departments who would emerge from the program as job candidates for both linguistics and anthropology departments.

Both the Anthropology and Linguistics Departments offer Teaching Assistantships and some research support which would be available to students of the joint Ph.D. program.

Program Requirements

In Anthropology, students are required to take two semesters of the interdisciplinary core course, Anth 608A and 608B, as well as Anth680, "Foundations of Linguistic Anthropology."

In Linguistics, students are required to take Ling 503, "Foundations of Syntactic Theory", Ling 510, "Phonology", and Ling 697A, "Prelim", as well as the one-credit 'Linguistics Colloquium" course.

In addition, students must select from a 'menu' of Linguistics and Anthropology courses to make up a total of 46 units of coursework, minimum. The menu requires:

Either LING 515 (Phonetics) or LING 508 (Statistical Analysis) AND either ANTH 620 (Linguistic Field Techniques) or LING/ANTH 588 (Linguistic Elicitation and Documentation)

Four additional courses in Linguistics from distinct 'core groups' (see the Linguistics Graduate Handbook for a description of the core groups and the courses associated with them).

Four additional courses in Anthropology, chosen from the following: Anth 576 Language and Culture, Anth 580 Historical Linguistics, Anth 583 Sociolinguistics, Anth 589 American Indian Languages, Anth 679 Language and Ethnography, and Anth 696C Topics Seminars

In addition, before moving on to their dissertation research, students write a comprehensive exam in Anthropology and a qualifying 'prelim' paper in Linguistics (while taking the "Prelim" course). During dissertation research, students must take at least 18 dissertation units, in compliance with Graduate College regulations.

The Faculty

Diana Archangeli (Ph.D. MIT 1984) Professor of Linguistics. Research interests in phonology and phonetics. In phonology, focus on feature interaction and distribution; also templatic morphology systems. In phonetics, curious about the physical articulation of phonological representations, especially where the perceived sound does not unambiguously match the sound posited phonologically.

Selected publications:

• Optimality Theory: An Overview (ed. and afterword with Terry Langendoen; chapter 1), Blackwell, 1997.
• Grounded Phonology, (with Douglas Pulleyblank), MIT Press, 1994.
• "Why not *NC", (with L. Moll and K. Ohno), Chicago Linguistics Society 34, 1998.

Ellen B. Basso (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1969) Professor of Anthropology. Research Interests: Language and culture of the Kalapalo of Brazil, and of the Northern Athapaskans.

Selected publications:

• The Last Cannibals, University of Texas Press, 1995.
• In Favor of Deceit: A Study of Tricksters in an Amazonian Society, 1987.
• A Musical View of the Universe, 1985.

Andrew Carnie (Ph.D., MIT, 1995) Assistant Professor of Linguistics. Research Interests: Theoretical Syntax, Predication, Phrase Structure, Verb-initial languages, Celtic, Mayan, Endangered Languages.

Selected Publications:

• The Syntax of Verb Initial Languages, (ed. with Eithne Guilfoyle), Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
• "Minimalist approach to some problems of Irish Word Order", (with Jonathan Bobaljik) in B. Borsley and I. Roberts (eds.), The syntax of the Celtic languages, Cambridge University Press. 223-240, 1996.
• "Two Types of Non-verbal Predication in Modern Irish", Canadian Journal of Linguistics 42, 57-73, 1997.

Dick Demers (Ph.D. University of Washington, 1968) Professor of Linguistics. Research interests: instrumental phonetics; phonology; syntax/typology. Favorite languages: Lummi in particular, Salish family in general; Native American languages, especially those of the Southwest.

Selected publications:

• "Prominence in Yaqui words", (with Eloise Jelinek and Fernando Escalante), IJAL, 1999.
• "Ch'eni, the giant woman who stole crybabies", (with Bill James) in M. Terry Thompson and N. Steven Egesdahl, eds., One People's Stories: A Collection of Salishan Myths and Legends, Smithsonian Museum Press, in press.
• "Predicates and pronominal arguments in Straits Salish", (with Eloise Jelinek), Language 70, 697-736, 1994.

Michael Hammond (Ph.D. UCLA, 1984) Professor of Linguistics. Research interests in phonology and morphology. In phonology, focus on the theory of stress and accent. Worked on other domains of phonological theory including autosegmental theory and templatic systems. In morphology, focus on inflectional systems and the theory of affixation. Also interested in poetic meter, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, learnability theory, and historical change.

Selected publications:

• English Phonology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, in press.
• "Vowel quantity and syllabification in English", Language 73, 1-17, 1997.
• "Metrical phonology", Annual Review of Anthropology 24, 313-342, 1995.

Jane H. Hill (Ph.D. UCLA, 1966) Regents' Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics. Research Interests: Native American languages (especially sociolinguistics), language and racism, language and political economy, narrative and discourse.

Selected publications:

• "Spanish in the indigenous languages of Mesoamerica and the Southwest: Beyond state theory to the dynamic of incorporation and resistance", Southwestern Journal of Linguistics 12 (1-2): 87-108
• "Language, race, and white public space", American Anthropologist, 1998
• "Tohono O'odham Plurals" (with Ofelia Zepeda), Anthropological Linguistics, 1998.

Simin Karimi (Ph.D. University of Washington, 1989) Associate Professor of Linguistics. Research interests: Syntax, The Interface of Syntax and Semantics, Typology, Universals, Iranian Linguistics.

Selected publications:

• "A Note on Parasitic Gaps and Specificity", Linguistic Inquiry, 1999.
• "Specificity Effects in Persian", Linguistic Review, 1999.
• "Persian Complex Verbs: Idiomatic or Compositional?", Lexicology 3, 273-318, 1997.

D. Terence Langendoen (Ph.D. 1964, MIT). Professor of Linguistics. Research interests: syntactic and semantic theory, and natural language processing, both by people and by computers. I have been involved for the past several years in a project with Eloise Jelinek to develop pedagogic grammars and other teaching materials for Yaqui, and am interested in the problem of developing standards for archiving texts, dictionaries and grammars of endangered languages. I have been since 1997 the editor of Linguistics Abstracts.

Selected publications:

• Optimality Theory: An Overview, (coedited with Diana Archangeli), Blackwell, 1997.
• "Limitations on embedding in coordinate structures", Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 27: 235-259, 1998.
• "Sobre las llamada cláusulas relativas en yaqui," (with Constantino Martínez-Fabián), III Encuentro de Lingüística en el Noroeste: Tomo I: Lenguas Indígenas, Vol. 2, 443-463, 1996.

Norma Mendoza-Denton (Ph.D., Stanford, 1997, Linguistics) Assistant Professor of Linguistic Anthropology. Research Interests: Sociolinguistic variation, Language and Gender, Language and Ethnicity.

Selected Publications:

• "Fighting Words; Latina Girls, Gangs, and Language Attitudes", Galindo and Gonzalez-Vasquez, eds., Chicanas and Language, University of Arizona Press, in press.
• "Pregnant Pauses: Silence and Authority in the Hill-Thomas Hearings", Bucholtz and Hall, eds., Gender Articulated: Language and the Culturally Constructed Self, 1995.
• "Syntactic Variation and Change in Progress: Loss of the Verbal Coda in Topic-Restricting As Far As Constructions", (with John Rickford, Thomas Wasow, and Juli Espinoza), Language 71, 1995.

Susan U. Philips (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1974) Professor of Anthropology. Research interests: ideology in discourse, language and law, gender and language

Selected Publications:

• Ideology in the Language of Judges, Oxford University Press, 1998.
• Language, Gender and Sex in Comparative Perspective, (with Susan Steele and Chris Tanz), Cambridge University Press, 1987.
• The Invisible Culture: Communication in Classroom and Community on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, Longman, reprinted by Waveland Press, 1983/1993.

Mary Willie (Ph.D. University of Arizona, 1991) Associate Professor of Linguistics. Research Interests: syntactic properties of Navajo, obviation, and discourse anaphora. Other interest is the development of multi-media Navajo teaching materials.

Selected publications:

• "Psych Verbs in Navajo", (with Eloise Jelinek), in E. Jelinek, K. Rice, and L. Saxon, eds.,
• Athabaskan Langauge Studies, Essays in Honor of Robert Young, University of New Mexico Press, 1996.
• "On the Expression of Modality in Navajo", in E. Jelinek, K. Rice, and L. Saxon, eds.,
• Athabaskan Langauge Studies, Essays in Honor of Robert Young, University of New Mexico Press, 1996.
• "Number and Person in Navajo", Encyclopedia of the American Indian Langauges, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1996.

Ofelia Zepeda (Ph.D. University of Arizona 1984). Professor of Linguistics. Several research projects on the Tohono O'odham language: developing materials suitable for studying and teaching the language, conducting a comprehensive dialect survey, and creating a contemporary Tohono O'odham literature.

Selected publications:

• A Papago Grammar, University of Arizona Press, 1983.
• Mat Hekid o Ju:/When it Rains: Pima and Papago Poetry, University of Arizona Press, 1984.

Emeritus Faculty

Eloise Jelinek (Ph.D. University of Arizona, 1981) Adjunct Associate Professor of Linguistics. Research Interests: syntax and semantics, language universals and typology; Native American Languages.

Selected Publications:

• "Quantification in Straits Salish", in Emmon Bach, Eloise Jelinek, Angelika Kratzer and Barbara Partee, eds., Quantification in Natural Languages, Kluwer, 1995.
• "Navajo as a Discourse Configurational Language", (with Mary Willie), Ted Fernald and Paul Platero, eds., Navajo Linguistics, Oxford University Press, in press.
• "Voice and Transitivity as Functional Projections in Yaqui", Miriam Butt and Willi Geuder, eds., Projections from the Lexicon, CSLI, 1988.

Adrienne Lehrer (Ph.D. University of Rochester, 1968. Professor Emerita of Linguistics. Research Interests: the organization of the lexicon and types of lexical-semantic relations. Worked on analyses of antonymy and polysemy among other kinds of semantic relations and has applied semantic field theory on a variety of semantic domains, such as cooking words, wine descriptors, emotion words, classifiers, and verbs of speaking. Recent work has been devoted to word-formation in English, especially the less well-studied constructions, such as blends and combining forms.

Selected publications:

• Wine and Conversation, Indiana University Press, 1983.
• Frames, Fields, and Contrasts, co-edited vith Eva Kittay, Erlbaum, 1992.
• Semantic Fields and Lexical Structure, North Holland, 1974.

Affiliated Faculty

Muriel Saville-Troike (Ph.D. University of Texas 1968, Linguistics) Professor of English. Research Interests: First and second language acquisition (especially Navajo and Chinese), language attrition, contrastive rhetoric.

Selected Publications:

• The Ethnography of Communication (second edition), Blackwell, 1989.
• "Differential effects of L2 on children's L1 development/attrition", (with J. Pan & L. Dutkova). Southwest Journal of Linguistics 14 (1-2), 125-149, 1995.
• "Development of the inflected verb in Navajo child language", E. Jelinek, S. Midgette, K. Rice, & L. Saxon, eds., Athapaskan Language Studies, University of New Mexico Press, 137-192 1996.

Rudolph C. Troike (PhD University of Texas [Austin], 1959) Professor of English. Research interests: Syntactic universals, especially WH-phenomena, and typological universals; American Indian languages, especially northern Mexico and Texas; American English; Chinese and Korean syntax; History of English grammatical analysis.

Selected publications:

• "Subject-Object Concord in Coahuilteco," Language 57:3, 658-673, 1981.
• "McDavid's Law [History, Phonology, and Sociology of a Southern Sound-change]," Journal of English Linguistics 19:2, 177-205, 1986.
• Bibliography of Bibliographies of the Languages of the World, Vol. I: General and Indo-European Languages of Europe. John Benjamins, 1990.

The Setting

The University of Arizona is located in Tucson, an ethnically varied city of over 600,000 in the Sonoran Desert of southeastern Arizona. At an altitude of approximately 2,500 feet, it is ringed by mountains up to 9,000 feet high. The 325 acre campus is located in the center of the city with easy access to all its amenities. The University is an active and expanding institution of about 35,000 students, with a sizable number of internationally recognized departments and outstanding library facilities.

Application Information

For more information, write to one of the following. Applicants should specifically mention that they are interested in the Joint Ph.D. Program in Anthropology and Linguistics.

Linguistics (Graduate Applications)
Douglas Building, Room 200E
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721

Anthropology (Graduate Applications)
Emil W. Haury Building, Room 221A
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721