Surrey doctoral student wins funding from the American Philosophical Society to support research
Thursday 29 May 2008
Claire Turner, who is studying for a PhD in the Surrey Morphology Group (SMG) at the University of Surrey, has recently received an award from the Phillips Fund for Native American Research (administered by the American Philosophical Society) to support her work on SENĆOŦEN, a highly endangered Salish language of Vancouver Island, BC, Canada. Claire has been working with two of the last fluent speakers of SENĆOŦEN since 2004. She has just returned from three months in British Columbia, working on her doctoral project, which involves the documentation of verbs and their uses.
This is a new source of funding for the SMG. Claire’s doctoral research is supported by a University Research Scholarship, and this additional funding will provide for further fieldwork on the language, to take place in April 2009.
Claire comments: “I am delighted to have received this funding, which will enable me to continue working with the elders. This is a crucial time for documentation of SENĆOŦEN, as there are currently fewer than twenty fluent speakers, and there is a growing interest in revitalisation. Any funding which contributes to this work is of great benefit to linguistic research and to the SENĆOŦEN language community.”
The SMG, run by Professor Greville Corbett and Dr Dunstan Brown, is a leading centre for research on the word structure of the world’s languages.
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