Nominee Biographical Notes

Patricia A. Shaw (Ph.D. University of Toronto 1976, Director, First Nations Languages Program, University of British Columbia)

A member of SSILA since its inception, Shaw’s linguistic research has been devoted both to the documentation and revitalization of several critically endangered North American languages and to elucidation of the insights that the intricate structure of these languages contribute to linguistic theory. Her publications draw on extensive fieldwork with Siouan (Dakota, Assiniboine, Stoney), Salish (hən’q’ əmin’əm’, St’at’imcets Lillooet, Nɬeʔkepmxcin Thompson. Sliammon), Wakashan (Nuuchahnulth, Kwak’wala, Haisla), Tsimsihan (Nisqa’a), and Athapaskan (Tahltan, Chilcotin). Since founding the UBC First Nations Languages program in 1997 as an integrated model of research, curriculum development, and post-secondary language teaching, she has worked in close collaboration with Aboriginal communities in multi­generational capacity-building for endangered language revitalization. She was the Director of the Aboriginal Languages and Literacy Institute at UBC in 2006 (http://alli.arts.ubc.ca), and has been an invited professor at LSA Summer Institutes (UCSC 1991, Berkeley 2009), the University of Graz (2003), and the UCSB InField Institute (2008). She is the Editor of the UBC Press First Nations Languages Series.

Frank R. Trechsel (Ph.D., Univ. of Texas at Austin)

Professor of Linguistics at Ball State University. His interests include case and agreement marking systems (particularly ergative system) and grammatical relations and relation-changing rules. He has worked on a number of different languages and language families, including Muskogean (Koasati, Choctaw), Mayan (Kiché, Jakaltek, Tzotzil), Tanoan (Southern Tiwa), and Totonacan (Totonac, Tepehua). His most recent publications include "Reciprocal /laa-/ in Totonacan" (IJAL, 2003) and "Symmetrical Objects in Misantla Totonac" (IJAL, 2008), both co-authored with Carolyn J. MacKay.

Doris Payne

has been associated with the University of Oregon since 1985, and is an international consultant with SIL International. Her work has focused on morphology, syntax (e.g. constituent order, argument structure, noun classification), lexical semantics, and discourse. She has done original field work in Peru on Yagua (Peba-Yaguan), in Venezuela on Panare (Cariban); and in Kenya with Nilotic languages. She has (especially collaborative) experience with other languages from South America, East Africa, Austronesia, and Asia. She has (co-)lead workshops and seminars in Argentina, Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, Thailand, China, Nigeria, and British Colombia, focusing on grammatical description and discourse analysis in minority languages. Her grants have included funding for the development of electronic databases for tone and syntactic analysis, lexicography, and text collections.

Timothy Montler

Distinguished Research Professor in the Linguistics and Technical Communication Department at the University of North Texas. He has worked in Salishan linguistics since 1977. His 1984 University of Hawaii dissertation was a sketch of the Saanich dialect of Northern Straits. He has also done field work and published on Alabama, a Muskogean language. Since 1992 he has been working closely with the Klallam (Salishan) tribes of Washington to help their language revitalization project. He is currently working on a dictionary and electronic archive of the Klallam language.