Marianne Huijsmans
PhD Candidate
Linguistics
Faculty of Arts
Research Themes: Language, Sustainability and Transnationalism
Marianne Huijsmans is currently working with the Tla’amin, Homalco, Klahoose, and Comox First Nations to create an e-dictionary of ʔayʔaǰuθəm, a Coast Salish language, under the supervision of Dr. Henry Davis. She is also studying the syntax, semantics and prosody of ʔayʔaǰuθəm, as well as SENĆOŦEN, a Coast Salish language spoken by the W̱SÁNEĆ people on Vancouver Island. Currently, her interests include the semantics of focus-sensitive particles in both languages and the syntax-prosody mapping of these clitic-rich languages.
Besides Central Salish, she also studies Ktunaxa, a language isolate spoken by the Ktunaxa people, whose traditional territory encompasses the Kootenay region of British Columbia and areas in Alberta, Montana, Washington and Idaho. She has been particularly focused on the semantic interpretation of demonstratives and bare nouns in Ktunaxa, as well as quantification in the nominal domain.
Marianne’s work also involves ongoing collaboration to mobilize linguistic documentation for use in language revitalization. At present, she is interested in learning more about language pedagogy in order to collaborate more effectively with language teachers in communities.
Research Interests
Semantics, syntax, focus, syntax-prosody mapping, linguistic documentation, language revitalization, language pedagogy.