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2015 Dissertation Drafts by Chris Corcoran

3.1 Sherbro consonant inventory 3.2 Sherbro vowel inventory 3.3 Sherbro tense mood aspect 3.4 She... more 3.1 Sherbro consonant inventory
3.2 Sherbro vowel inventory
3.3 Sherbro tense mood aspect
3.4 Sherbro verbal extensions

2. Background 2.1 Demographic information 2.1.1 Location: Coastal region of Sierra Leone (West A... more 2. Background
2.1 Demographic information
2.1.1 Location: Coastal region of Sierra Leone (West Africa)
2.1.2 Sociohistorical place within Sierra Leone
2.1.3 Endangered status
2.2 Sherbro language
2.2.1 Genetic affiliation: Mel, Niger-Congo
2.2.2 Dialects
2.2.3 Previous study of Sherbro
2.2.4 Atlantic language literature consulted for this study

3.1 Consonant inventory: Labiovelar stop, Prenasalized consonants, Dental stop 3.2 Vowel invento... more 3.1 Consonant inventory: Labiovelar stop, Prenasalized consonants, Dental stop
3.2 Vowel inventory: Vowel length, Tone, Vowel harmony
3.3 Tense mood aspect: Stative/Non-Stative distinction, unmarked predicates, and TMA
3.4 Verbal extensions: Resultative Stative/Accompaniment /-V[+high]l/, Causative/Pluractional /-i/, Telic /-V[+low]/, Comitative /-ma/, Instrumental /-ka/, Reflexive/Reciprocal /-ni/

Books by Chris Corcoran

Representations of Violence: Art about the Sierra Leone Civil War, 2005

Papers by Chris Corcoran

This article presents an argument against the use of language analysis interviews in asylum proce... more This article presents an argument against the use of language analysis interviews in asylum proceedings whenever the case involves questions of dialect, sociolect, closely related languages or distinguishing between languages which are both used in the applicant's claimed speech community. I examine a language analysis interview's interactional constraints and the asylum seeker's response to these constraints. I argue the asylum seeker misreads them as an indication he is participating in a gatekeeping type of interview. Through an examination of the anti-immigrant sentiments in Rotterdam and the defining cultural categories of creole identity in Sierra Leone, I attempt to make sense of his interpretations and subsequent linguistic choices. This exposition is presented as an example of how an asylum seeker's actively constructed response poses problems for the reliability of linguistic identification.

During the Sierra Leone civil war, 1991–2002, many European countries granted asylum to Sierra Le... more During the Sierra Leone civil war, 1991–2002, many European countries granted asylum to Sierra Leonean refugees. Those without documentation were given an opportunity to participate in a language analysis interview. There are many problems with the authentication process employed in these types of interviews (See, for example, Eades 2010, Corcoran 2004). However, this paper focuses on the particular issue of competing ideologies associated with voice quality: relative breathiness, pitch, loudness, and tempo. From 2000–2010, I contributed to assessments or counter-assessments in more than thirty cases. European interviewers frequently admonished applicants to “speak up” in order to properly represent themselves. Applicants who spoke slowly using a lowered quiet breathy voice were identified as having something to hide or, at best, as rubes who did not understand how recording devices worked. In contrast to these Western assessments, I argue there are pan-West African ideologies that associate these features with “good speech” (Obeng 2003: vii; Irvine 1973: 160–64, 1974; Yankah 1995) and, in particular for Sierra Leoneans, with asylum-worthy status. Using Silverstein’s (1981) explication of the limits of awareness, I discuss how these ways of speaking have been taken up in naturalizing discourses and confound our ability to identify them as sites for potential misunderstanding.

Comparative Creole Syntax: Parallel outlines of 18 Creole grammars, 2007

This paper examines the role sociohistorical evidence may play in untangling the relationship bet... more This paper examines the role sociohistorical evidence may play in untangling the relationship between Guinea Coast Creole English, Sierra Leone Krio, and Settler English and by extension their roles in the Afro-genesis debate. In this brief presentation, I am not able to propose a solution that would completely untangle the varieties, but, in particular, I evaluate the proposal that Sierra Leone Krio originated in the Americas. Perhaps more than most fields of linguistics, creolistics has grappled with sociohistorical evidence and its bearing on linguistic questions; however, within creolistics to date no sociohistorical work has addressed the modern location most associated with Sierra Leone Krio, that is, the Sierra Leone peninsula.

This paper examines linguistic contact between the Caribbean and Hawai‘i. Since 1974 when Bickert... more This paper examines linguistic contact between the Caribbean and Hawai‘i. Since 1974 when Bickerton first proposed what he later called the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (LBH), many have challenged his reasoning, but few have challenged his assumption that historical contact cannot explain the similarities between Hawai‘i Creole English (HCE) and the creoles of the Caribbean: “Direct transmission can be ruled out straight away: there has been negligible historic contact between Hawai‘i and Caribbean” (Bickerton 1980: 10). This paper seeks to extend the investigations of Goodman and Holm focusing on the period Bickerton identifies as the period of creolization, 1900–1920. Following DeGraff (2005), I suggest Bickerton’s particular form of “Creole Exceptionalism” is unwarranted. The first half of the paper examines how U.S. Imperialism links the economic histories of the Caribbean and Hawai‘i and traces the economically motivated migration of English-speaking people from the Caribbean. The second half of the paper presents the record-keeping practices and social conditions in Hawai‘i that contributed to the obscurity of Hawaiian-Caribbean contact, and examines the ecology that may have contributed to the adoption of Caribbean creole features by the creators of HCE. What Bickerton considers negligible historical contact may not have been negligible linguistic contact.

St Kitts and the Atlantic Creoles: The texts of Samuel Augustus Mathews in perspective, 1998

This chapter assesses the contribution the Mathews texts can make to the debate on the developmen... more This chapter assesses the contribution the Mathews texts can make to the debate on the development of Caribbean English Creoles by examining the demographics and population movements on St Kitts during the 17th and 18th centuries, the social history of the colony, and the distribution of linguistic features in the texts. We are especially inspired by Mille's (1990) study of Ambrose Gonzales’ literary Gullah, which offers an explanation for the high density of basilectal features found in that study as well as in the Matthews texts and conclude the high density of basilectal features are more a function of Mathews’ peculiar literary motives than a reflection of Kittitian as it was spoken at the time.

Chicago Linguistic Society, Jan 1, 2000

Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2003

This volume is a selection of 15 papers from approximately 125 papers presented at three consecut... more This volume is a selection of 15 papers from approximately 125 papers presented at three consecutive meetings of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics (San Diego in January 1996, Chicago in January 1997, and London in June 1997). The collection represents a good variety of contributions in terms of theoretical concerns and languages discussed. Two of the chapters present a survey of particular phenomena in a number of pidgins and creoles: stativity and time reference (Holm) and wh-words and question formation (Clements & Mahboob). Another chapter revisits the prototypical creole tense-mood-aspect system with an examination of a larger database of Sranan speech than has been previously seen in the literature (Winford). The remainder of the chapters address historical linguistic concerns, discussing issues of Indo-European development (Goyette) as well as creole genesis. The articles on genesis represent an integration of recent developments from outside the creolist world—for...

2016 Election Research by Chris Corcoran

This paper details anomalies in the distribution of Trump’s votes and the concentration of his ga... more This paper details anomalies in the distribution of Trump’s votes and the concentration of his gains in four battleground states in the 2016 presidential election. In Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the pattern of Trump’s county results are unlike those of any candidate—Republican or Democratic—in any of the nine previous presidential elections. However, in the rest of the country, Trump’s gains and losses were evenly distributed among counties signifying the distribution of his votes amongst counties was similar to that of Romney’s. In the chapters that follow, I review the unevenness of Trump’s Michigan gains (Chapter 2) and compare these results to the rest of the country in order to establish a baseline against which to calculate anomaly (Chapter 3). On that basis, I identify three additional states with anomalous county results (Chapter 4). Having ruled out non-major-party participation, swing status, Rust-Belt demographics, and state-specific histories as an explanation for these anomalous patterns (Chapter 4), I identify a subset of anomalous counties (Chapters 5–8). Using previous research, I outline plausible election system attacks to account for these anomalies, discuss how manipulation could have gone undetected, and show how the electronic manipulation of just a handful of counties—0.45% of the presidential vote nationwide—delivered a Trump win (Chapter 9).

Representations of Violence: Art about the Sierra Leone Civil War, 2005

Comparative Creole Syntax: Parallel outlines of 18 Creole grammars, 2007

St Kitts and the Atlantic Creoles: The texts of Samuel Augustus Mathews in perspective, 1998

Chicago Linguistic Society, Jan 1, 2000

Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2003