Rikker Dockum presents at SEALS 26 and an Austroasiatic workshop

September 2, 2016

In May, PhD candidate Rikker Dockum traveled to Manila to present a talk at SEALS 26, the annual meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society. In his talk, titled “Tone analysis in Southeast Asia: computational models and traditional methods,” Rikker compared the results of computational modeling (specifically, principal components analysis and k​-means clustering) of Khamti tone data against his earlier work assigning tone categories using traditional methods of researcher audition and instrumental analysis in consultation with native consultants.

Rikker is currently en route to Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he will deliver a paper titled “Numeral classifiers in areal perspective: Khmer and Thai ‘syntactic borrowing’ revisited” on Monday at the new Austroasiatic Working Group’s 2016 workshop, “Austroasiatic Syntax in Areal and Diachronic Perspective.” In his talk, Rikker will examine numeral classifiers in Khmer and Thai in order to challenge prevailing explanations of the historical source of the syntactic parallelism between these two languages. More broadly, his study brings new perspective to the question of how contact-induced change occurs in areas with strong linguistic convergence.

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