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Will Bennett

Associate Professor

 William Bennett

BA (Carleton College), PhD (Rutgers)

Email: w.bennett@ru.ac.za

Personalized website

 

Modules taught

  • Linguistics 1 Sounds of the World
  • Linguistics 2 Phonetics and Phonology
  • Linguistics 3 Phonetics and Phonology
  • Linguistics 3 African Linguistics
  • Postgraduate Phonetics and Phonology
  • Postgraduate Optimality Theory

 

Research Interests

My research interests are mostly on the sound-related side of the field: how phonetics, phonology & morphology (and sometimes syntax) interact. My work also focuses on under-represented/minority languages (particularly African languages), and I'm also very interested in endangered language description & documentation.

My most recent work focuses mostly on long-distance consonant interactions, including dissimilation and consonant harmony; and on describing & documenting Defaka & Nkoroo, two endangered Ijoid languages spoken in the Niger Delta.

 

Selected recent publications 

Book

 

Journal articles

  • 2014: Assimilation, Dissimilation, and Surface Correspondence in Sundanese. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, DOI 10.1007/s11049-014-9268-2. 
  • 2014: Some differences between clicks and labio-velars. South African Journal of African Languages 34(2):115-126.
  • 2014: Agreement, Dependencies, and Surface Correspondence in Obolo and beyond. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus 44:149-171.

 

PhD dissertation

 

Conference proceedings

  • 2012: Dissimilation By Correspondence in Sundanese.  In Proceedings of the 30th West Coast Conference in Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 30).
  • 2012: Two subject asymmetries in Defaka focus constructions. In Proceedings of the 29th West Coast Conference in Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 29). [With Akin Akinlabi & Bruce Connell]
  • 2012: Defaka and Ijo: A reassessment of the Ijoid relationship. In Proceedings of the 6th World Congress of African Linguistics, Cologne 2009. [With Bruce Connell and others]

Last Modified: Thu, 23 Mar 2023 15:18:21 SAST