Ph.D., University
of Hawai'i at Mānoa, 2005B.A. Hons, University of Western Australia, 1997
Curriculum Vitae html pdf
Keira
Gebbie Ballantyne
Ph.D., University
of Hawai'i at Mānoa, 2005
B.A.
Hons, University of Western Australia, 1997
Curriculum
Vitae html
pdf
ballanty
at hawaii
dot edu
or
keiraballantyne at gmail dot com
I
am
broadly interested in the way that structural information within units
larger
than the sentence is communicated and comprehended. What are the cues
and clues
within a piece of running text that act as signposts to the unfolding
structure
of that text? How is a narrative produced and understood in such a way
that the
background scene-setting information is distinct from the high points
of
narrative? What sorts of syntactic and morphological resources are
exploited to
make that difference? How do we identify and track the various
characters or
objects within a piece of discourse? What makes some of them more
central than
others?
I
am also
interested in Austronesian languages, language endangerment and in
field
research methodology.
Yapese
Yapese
is
spoken on the islands of Yap,
at the western edge of Micronesia.
It is
a member
of the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian language family, but has no
close
relatives within Oceanic. It has also borrowed heavily from both
Oceanic and
non-Oceanic neighbours. Around six thousand people speak Yapese.
I first became interested in Yapese while taking an undergraduate field methods class in 1995 at the University of Western Australia. I completed my Honours dissertation, Reduplication in Yapese, in 1997, working with Ms. Josephine Giltug, a native speaker of Yapese. I have been a student in the doctoral program at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa since 1998. In the spring of 2001, I compiled a small corpus of written Yapese texts in Honolulu with the assistance of Ms. Stella Kolinski. In late 2002 I extended the corpus with a series of tape recorded texts collected on a field trip to Yap, working with Ms. Angela Y. Kenrad and Sherri Manna’.
Dissertation
Research
My
dissertation,
Textual Structure and
Discourse Prominence in Yapese Narrative, concerns the
relationship between the
foregrounded
portion of a narrative text and the accessibility of referring
expressions in
discourse. The work describes the way in which the tense-mood-aspect
system of
Yapese works to create a complex foreground and background within
narrative
text, as well as the varying representation of entities in discourse
dependent
upon the degree of attention that they warrant.
Yapese Corpora
Yapese
Corpora Page
The data
for my
dissertation come from a small two-part corpus of Yapese
collected between 2000 and 2002. You are welcome to use these
data for your own research.
Yapese
stories online
(untranslated)
from PREL (Pacific Resources for Education and Learning)
Ethnologue:
Languages of the World
Academia
Sinica Formosan Language Archive
UH Language
Documentation Center