Dr. Christopher Hammerly

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia and Director of the Experimental Linguistics and Fieldwork Lab (ELF-Lab). I am a descendent of the White Earth Nation in Minnesota, and much of my work focuses on understanding and documenting my ancestral language Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe). I use a variety of methods to understand the cognitive representations and processes underpinning human knowledge of syntax (sentence structure) and morphology (word structure), including formal theories, fieldwork, computational models, and experimental tasks. I am particularly interested in the nature of the basic units of morphosyntax (person, number, and noun classification), how these units participate in long-distance dependencies such as movement and agreement, and how the work of linguists can be applied to create curricula and technologies for language revitalization.