Amy Dahlstrom

Dr. Amy Dahlstrom investigates issues of morphology, syntax, semantics, and information structure in Algonquian languages, especially Meskwaki (Fox), spoken in Iowa, and Plains Cree, spoken in Saskatchewan and Albert; her syntactic work is in the theoretical framework of Lexical Functional Grammar. Her research combines data from field elicitation with analysis of narrative texts, because textual attestations are particularly important for teasing out information structure relations such as topic and focus in languages with extremely flexible word order, and for understanding the role played by the discourse-based opposition within third person in Algonquian languages known as obviation. As part of her work with narrative texts, she has edited and translated portions of a remarkable corpus of texts (more than 27,000 pages) written in the Meskwaki syllabary by monolingual speakers in the early 20th century, making them available both to scholars and to members of the community who no longer read the traditional syllabary.