Irene Appelbaum

I am a Professor in the Linguistics Program (Anthropology Department). I began my academic career as a philosopher interested in linguistics as a higher-level science, with a focus on the foundations of speech perception research. For the past several years, my research has focused on the Ktunaxa language - a language isolate spoken by a handful of people in Montana, Idaho, and British Columbia in Canada. This project has two central goals: contributing to the documentation of Ktunaxa by interlinearizing narratives Franz Boas collected and published as Kutenai Tales (1918); and analyzing these texts for what they can tell us about the relationship between grammar and discourse, both in Ktunaxa and in other languages. I am particularly interested in how our assumptions about the respective domains of grammar and discourse guide, and sometimes misguide, research on language.

Research interests:

• Ktunaxa Language and Linguistics
• Language Documentation
• Grammatical Relations
• Language Typology
• Grammaticalization
• Discourse Analysis
• Foundations of Speech Perception
• Ancient Greek Grammar

• LING 465 History and Structure of English for Teachers 
• LING 473/573 Language and Culture 
• LING 474/574 Historical Linguistics
• LING 489/589 Morphology 
• LING 494 Seminar: Topics in Discourse 
• LING 494 Seminar: Referential Hierarchies 
• LING 494 Seminar: Approaches to Sociolinguistic Variation  
• LING 570 Seminar: Cognitive Linguistics 
• LING 570 Seminar: Deixis 
• LING 570 Seminar: Typology 
• PHIL 471 Philosophy of Language 
• PHIL 479 Pragmatics 
• PHIL 495 Philosophy of Linguistics 
• PHIL 501 Emergence and Language 
• WLC 295 Linguistics for Language Majors 
• GRK 101 Elementary Greek I 
• GRK 102 Elementary Greek II