Joshua Lieberstein

About

I am a MA student in the Linguistics department at UC Santa Cruz co-advised by Roumyana Pancheva and Maziar Toosarvandani. My research interests lie primarily in the syntax of indigenous languages, often intersecting with prosody and semantics. These interests are borne out through the documentation and description of the Mayan language K'iche' spoken in Guatemala. This is a part of my ongoing fieldwork on the Chichicastenango dialect.

• View my recent HSP Poster here
• and the full manuscript here

Outside of linguistics, I am an aspiring musician, avid dancer and lover of nature.

Research

Polarity, Ellipsis and Verb-Initial Order in K'iche'

The Reporting of Speech in K'iche'

Verbless Clauses in K'iche'

Ambiguity Advantage Effect in Wh-Questions

• accepted as a publication to UGA Working Papers

Fieldwork

K'iche' is a Mayan language spoken in the highlands of Guatemala by around a million speakers but this number is rapidly declining due to globalization and pressures to speak Castellano and English. I work primarily with speakers from Chichicastenango, K'iche' an understudied dialect with a vastly different phonology and syntax from the varieties of K'iche' that have been studied to date. My field work focuses primarily on the theoretical description of the language within the generativist framework with the goal of providing resources not only to the linguistic community but to the local community as well.

Apart from the theoretical description of the language, I believe that to document and study an indigenous language one must understand the culture as well. To that end I also document the spiritual practices of the ajq'ijab', those who count the days and serve as spiritual guides in their communities. I believe that a deep understanding of the circumstances that a language came to be can help us better understand the syntax and lexicon and provide valuable insights into the inner-workings of the language.

Resources

• Learn K'iche'!

Curriculum Vitae

Click below to view my CV:

• View CV

Elements

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';