Scott AnderBois
Biography
Scott AnderBois' research is focused on community-engaged language documentation, working in collaboration with speakers of A'ingae (an indigenous language isolate of Amazonian Ecuador) and colleagues to create a diverse multimedia, multi-purpose collection of texts and other language materials. Together, they use these materials to further community language goals and to answer scientific questions about the language's grammar and use. These questions vary but are most typically focused on issues in semantics/pragmatics, exploring ways in which principles governing linguistic meaning vary or are constant across languages. He also explores these sorts of semantic and pragmatic questions through work on Yucatec Maya (a Mayan language of southern Mexico, see U koorpusil maaya t'aan, a digital corpus he co-created with Miguel Oscar Chan Dzul), Tagalog, and American English.
Publications
Scott AnderBois, Grant Armstrong, and Edber Dzidz Yam. to appear. Los preverbos en maya yucateco (Preverbs in Yucatec Maya). Cuadernos de Colegio de México. https://research.clps.brown.edu/anderbois/PDFs/AnderBoisArmstrongDzidzYam-subm.pdf
Maksymilian Dąbkowski and Scott AnderBois. 2024. Rationale and precautioning clauses: Insights from A'ingae. Journal of Semantics, Volume 40, Issue 2-3, May-August 2023, Pages 391–425, https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffac012
Holly Zheng and Scott AnderBois. 2023. Definiteness in A'ingae and its implications for pragmatic competition. Formal Approaches to Languages of South America Andrés Saab and Cilene Rodrigues (eds), Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22344-0_13
Scott AnderBois, Daniel Altshuler, and Wilson Silva. 2023. The forms and functions of switch reference in A'ingae. Languages - an MDPI Journal 8(2), 137. https://www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/8/2/137
Teaching
ANTH 1840: Indigenous languages of the Americas: an introduction
LING 1870: Linguistic Field Methods (working with a K'iche' speaker in Spring '25)
LING 1310: Linguistic variation and universals (students may select an indigenous language as a focus language)