Research
I am currently involved in projects related to the
documentation of four Native American (or First Nations) languages:
Sahaptin (Yakama (or Yakima) dialect) (spoken in Washington state),
Deg Xinag (spoken in Alaska), Kwadacha (Ft. Ware) Sekani (Tsek'ene),
and Witsuwit'en (spoken in British Columbia).
Some research results (textual):
Some research results (lexical):
- (2022) Sharon Hargus, compiler. Witsuwit'en Hibikinic: Witsuwit'en-English and English
Witsuwit'en. Witset B.C.: Witsuwit'en Language and Culture Society.
[print dictionary with 16,138 accompanying sound files] Dictionary website.
- (2019) Sharon Hargus, Mike Abou, Mary Charlie, Edna McCook, Eileen McCook,
Louie Tomah, Nellie Charlie. Kwadacha Bilingual Dictionary: Tsek'ene-English and
English-Tsek'ene. Kwadacha B.C.: Kwadacha Education Society. [print
dictionary with 7,440 accompanying sound files] Dictionary website.
- (2009) Virginia Beavert and Sharon Hargus. Ichishkíin
S
ínwit Yakama/Yakima Sahaptin
Dictionary. Toppenish and Seattle: Heritage University and UW
Press. [There is no colon in the title or other punctuation to
separate the two languages of the title for reasons related to
maximization of search results.]
Some research results (grammatical):
- (submitted) 'Onomatopoeia in Kwadacha Tsek'ene'. Onomatopieia,
ed. by Lívia Körtvélyessy. Ms.
- (2021) Sharon Hargus and Virginia Beavert. 'Characteristics of
non-pre-vocalic ejectives in Sahaptin'. UW Working Papers in
Linguistics.
- (2021) Joana Jansen and Sharon Hargus. 'Sahaptin research at a
distance'. SSILA virtual meeting, Distant Lightning: Language
Documentation from a Distance. Slides.
- (2020) Alicia Beckford Wassink and Sharon Hargus. 'Heritage Language Features and the Yakama English
Dialect'. Speech in the Western States. Vol. 3: Understudied
Varieties. (Publication of the American Dialect Society 105) Durham:
Duke University Press. 11-38.
- (2019, 2020) Witsuwit'en literacy
training materials
- (2019) 'What toneless Dene languages can tell us about Dene
tonogenesis.' Presented at National Science Foundation, May 24, 2019.
Slides.
- (2019) Sharon Hargus, Gina Levow, Richard Wright. 'An acoustic
study of Deg Xinag fricatives'. UW Working Papers in Linguistics.
- (2019) 'The Witsuwit'en and Kwadacha dictionary projects,'
presented at American Anthropological Association/Canadian
Anthropology Society/La Societé Canadienne d'Anthropolgie, Vancouver B.C., November 21, 2019.
Slides (expanded for UW
presentation, 4-17-20).
- (2019) Sharon Hargus, Olga Lovick, Siri G. Tuttle 'Glossing Dene
Languages: Issues and recommendations,' presented at Dene Languages
Conference, Davis CA, July 7, 2019. Slides
- (2018) 'Web sites for Dene texts,' presented at Dene Languages
Conference, Smith River CA, June 1, 2018. Slides
- (2018) 'The Kwadacha Tsek'ene Nuts'oodalh stories,' presented at
SSILA, Salt Lake City UT, Jan. 5, 2018. Slides
- (2017) 'Witsuwit'en blends,' presented at Dene Languages
Conference, Camp Verde AZ, June 28, 2017. Slides
- (2016) 'Sounds and writing systems of Deg Xinag, Tsek'ene and
Witsuwit'en.' Guest lecture for Dene course, Leslie Saxon, University
of Victoria. Slides
- Hargus, Sharon and Virginia Beavert (2016) 'Characteristics of
non-prevocalic ejectives in Yakima Sahaptin,' presented at NoWPhon,
Eugene OR, May 16, 2016. Slides.
- Hargus, Sharon and Virginia Beavert (2015) 'The Northwest Sahaptin present perfect in texts,' presented at SSILA, Portland OR, Jan. 11, 2015. Slides
- Beavert, Virginia and Sharon Hargus (2015) 'Dictionaries and texts for all,' presented at SSILA (session: Dictionaries, text editions, and corpora: Ensuring value for multiple stakeholders), Portland OR, Jan. 10, 2015. Slides
- (2014) 'The lexical representation of Kwadacha classifiers,' presented at Workshop on Dene Verbal Paradigms, University of Toronto, September 26, 2014. Slides
- (2014) 'Documenting for revitalization: Kwadacha Tsek'ene, a case study,' presented at Dene Languages Conference, University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George B.C., June 19, 2015. Slides
- (2012) 'Deg Xinag Disjunct Prefixes and Positions', presented at 2012 Athabaskan/Dene Languages Conference, Western Washington University,
Bellingham WA, August 15, 2012. Slides
- (2012) 'Deg Xinag "Voiceless Unaspirates": A Case of Phonologically Driven Phonetics?', presented at UCSD Department of Linguistics colloquium, May 14, 2012. Slides
- (2012) 'First position clitics in Northwest Sahaptin', presented at Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, Portland, OR. PDF of slides
- (2011) 'Stop and affricate features in Athabaskan (in general) and Deg Xinag (in particular)', presented at Western Conference on Linguistics, Vancouver, B.C. PDF of slides
- (2011) 'Insubordination in Deg Xinag', presented at the 2011
Athabaskan Languages Conference, Whitehorse YT. PDFs of slides, references.
- (2011) 'Athabaskan Languages.' Oxford Bibliographies Online.
- (2010) 'Dictionaries and linguists: Some methods and results of
Ichishkíin S
ínwit.' Department of Linguistics, University of
Washington colloquium. PDF of slides.
- (2010) 'Athabaskan Phonetics and
Phonology'. Language and Linguistics Compass 3/1: 1-22. Corrected proofs.
- (to appear) NSF Result Highlight 'Athabaskan Personal Histories of
Climate Change in Alaska and Canada', PI Sharon Hargus, University of
Washington. Article (PDF),
accompanying figures (map, photo1, photo2, graph). Analysis of weather data for
this Highlight was performed by Rick Thoman, lead forecaster, National
Weather Service, Fairbanks. Thoman has a more detailed write-up of
the weather data here.
- (2010) Sharon Hargus. Phonetic vs. phonological rounding in
Athabaskan languages. PDF of slides, PDF of references. Presented at LabPhon
12, Albuquerque, NM. (reposted July 16, 2010). The article will appear in Journal of
Laboratory Phonology 3:163-193.
- (2010) Sharon Hargus. Effects on consonant duration in Fort Ware
Tsek'ene. Presented at Athabaskan/Dene Languages Conference, Eugene,
OR. PDF of slides, PDF of references. Spreadsheets I used to
show that the findings of Bird 2004 on consonant duration in Dakelh
could have been obtained from unequal numbers of tokens in different
positions: this spreadsheet provides
plausible durations for tokens in different positions using the
numbers given in Appendix B of Bird 2004; this spreadsheet was the input to an ANOVA.
- Hargus, Sharon (2010) "Vowel quality and
duration in Deg Xinag.", Proceedings of the 2009 Dene
(Athabaskan) Languages Conference, ed. by Siri Tuttle and Justin
Spence. ANLC Working Papers. Also presented at CAA meeting, Vancouver
BC. (slides) [Supported by NSF
DEL-0651853 and OPP-0137483]
- Hargus, Sharon (2009) "Causatives and transitionals in Kwadacha
Tsek'ene." (slides) Presented at the Athabaskan Languages Conference,
Berkeley, CA. [Supported by NSF DEL-0651853 and Kwadacha Education
Society]
- Hargus, Sharon (2009) "A HL% boundary tone in
Athabaskan?" Presented at SSILA meeting, San Francisco CA. (slides) [Supported by NSF DEL-0651853
and Kwadacha Education Society]
- Hargus, Sharon and Virginia Beavert (2009) "Sahaptin Intonational
Phonology." Presented at SSILA meeting, San Francisco CA. (handout summarizing
content of poster)
- Hargus, Sharon (2008) "A Master-Apprentice program as a component
of language revitalization." Presented at Moricetown Language
Authority Conference, Moricetown, BC. (slides)
- Wright, Richard, Sharon Hargus, and Julia Miller (2008) "Using acoustics
to resolve place controversies in Deg Xinag." Presented at CAA meeting,
Vancouver BC. (slides)
[Supported by NSF DEL-0651853 and OPP-0137483]
- Hargus, Sharon and Lillian Morris (2008) "Witsuwit'en perspectives
on climate change in the Bulkley R. area (British Columbia)."
Presented at Conference on Climate, Language and Indigenous Perspectives,
Fairbanks AK. (slides)
[Supported by NSF DEL-0651853]
- Hargus, Sharon and Mike Abou (2008) "Intonation in Kwadacha (Fort
Ware Tsek'ene)." Presented at 2008 Dene Languages Conference, Cold
Lake AB. (slides)
[Supported by NSF DEL-0651853 and Kwadacha Education Society]
- Hargus, Sharon (2008) "Deg Xinag lateral affricates: Phonetic and
historical perspectives." Poster presented at SSILA meeting, Chicago
IL, January 2008. (handout summarizing
content of poster) [Supported by NSF DEL-0651853 and OPP-0137483]
- (2008) Review of Making Dictionaries: Preserving Indigenous
Languages of the Americas, by William Frawley, Kenneth Hill and Pamela
Munro. International Journal of American Linguistics 74:141-146.
- (2007) "Design Issues in Athabaskan Dictionaries."
Presented at Dene Languages meeting, Tsaile AZ, June
2007. Ms., slides
- (2007) Witsuwit'en Grammar: Phonetics, Phonology,
Morphology. Vancouver:UBC Press. Errata:
- There is a typo on the subtitle of
the cover as printed by UBC Press. The correct subtitle is
'Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology', as shown here. (When it came time to print the
book, an older, uncorrected cover illustration was used.)
- p. 49 "usually inspected for errors,": should be "visually
inspected for errors,"
- Hargus, Sharon and Virginia Beavert (2006) "High-ranking affix
faithfulness in Yakima Sahaptin." Don Baumer, David Montero, and
Michael Scanlon (eds.) Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference
on Formal Linguistics. Somerville: Cascadilla Press. 177-185.
- Hargus, Sharon and Virginia Beavert (2006) "Initial clusters and
minimality in Yakima Sahaptin." Phonology 23:21-58.
- Hargus, Sharon and Virginia Beavert (2005) "A note on the phonetic
correlates of stress in Yakima Sahaptin." University of Washington
Working Papers in Linguistics 24: 64-95.
- Hargus, Sharon and Keren Rice (eds.) (2005) Athabaskan Prosody. John
Benjamins.
- (2005) "Prosody in two Athabaskan Languages of Northern British
Columbia." In Hargus and Rice (eds.), 393-423.
- Rice, Keren and Sharon Hargus (2005) "Introduction." In Hargus and
Rice (eds.), 1-45.
- Hargus, Sharon and Keren Rice (2005) "Preface to Michael Krauss'
article." 47-49.