Joshua Lieberstein

About

I am a MA student in the Linguistics department at UC Santa Cruz. My research interests lie primarily in syntax, prosody and their intersections. This undertaking mainly focuses on the non-verbal domain; sentences in which there is no verb nor temporal marking. 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.

I also am interested in the brain and its relation to our production and comprehension of language. This has manifested itself with recent work on sentence processing and the ambiguity advantage. View my recent HSP Poster here and manuscript here .

Research

My research centers around the syntax of non-verbal clauses and how they are similar and differen from the verbal domain. I investigate this through the Mayan language K'iche' which has a rich understudied system of non-verbals. Here is a recent handout on my work on copular clauses in K'iche', a rich domain of verbless clauses. Email me for a draft of the paper

A manuscript of my previous work on the Ambiguity Advantage in wh-questions in English

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.

Curriculum Vitae

Click below to view my CV:

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Elements

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