Primary Research Interests
•Phonetics & Phonology, especially as they relate to higher-level prosodic phenomena such as intonation, stress, and duration;
•Language Evolution and Development, in terms of both the original genesis of human communication and the ways in which Darwinian natural selection pressures are exhibited in language change;
•Language Documentation, especially regarding the ways in which communities can have access to linguistic materials produced during research, and ways to modify those materials into useful tools for language instruction and preservation, as well as the importance of intensive, long-term fieldwork for both language documentation and clarifying our theoretical understanding of language.
Current Projects
•Production characteristics of singleton and geminate stops in Finnish.
with Kaori Idemaru and Susan G. Guion
•Stress and coarticulation: Findings from nasal airflow.
with Melissa Redford
•Research Assistant and Junior Author – Nahuatl Tonogensis
Assisting in an ongoing project headed by Dr. Susan Guion and Dr. Jonathan Amith (Gettysburg College) to describe the development of pitch accent in a dialect of Guerrero Nahuatl. Responsibilities have included organization and management of large amounts of data and conducting a wide array of acoustic measurements, as well as assisting with the drafting of a paper for publication.
•Pitch Accent in Tolowa Athabaskan
This project will describe the realization of pitch accent in Tolowa, an Athabaskan language of the Pacific Coast group of the family. Although Tolowa has previously been described as having no tone (unlike many other members of the Athabaskan family, which have independently innovated tone), it does exhibit various pitch contours at the level of the word. This description will be grounded in what is currently known about Athabaskan tonogenesis in an effort to provide a more complete description of the phonetic characteristics of Proto-Athabaskan that lead to the current state of the various languages.
Other Research Interests
Languages of the Pacific Northwest, especially the Athabaskan and Penutian families; acoustic phonetics; the interaction of complex phonological and morphological systems, especially as it relates to historical change; tonogenesis; language preservation and revitalization; typology of case marking; Finno-Ugric and Uto-Aztecan languages.
Christopher Doty
Office: 266 Straub Hall
Office Hours:
Winter 2009: TBA
Contact Information
Mailing Address:
Department of Linguistics
1290 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-1290
USA
Office Phone:
+1-541-346-0730
+1-541-346-0730
My CV (pdf) contains the most up-to-date information about my research.
Links:
Languages of the Americas