WSU-English


Martha Ratliff Associate Professor Office: 10303.3, 5057 Woodward Hours: 3-5 pm on Monday Phone: (313) 577-7646 E-mail: martha_ratliff@wayne.edu

Area of Specialization:
Linguistics - phonology/morphology, typology, historical linguistics, Southeast Asian linguistics; The function of tone in tone languages of Asia, Africa, and the Americas; The description of Hmong-Mien languages; The reconstruction of the ancestor language of the Hmong-Mien family; The relationships among languages of Asia and Southeast Asia

Education

B.A., Carleton College
M.A.T., English Education, University of Chicago
Ph.D., Linguistics, University of Chicago

Representative Publications

Meaningful Tone: a Study of Tonal Morphology in Compounds, Form Classes, and Expressive Phrases in White Hmong, De Kalb Il: Northern Illinois University Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1992.

"Tone Language Type Change in Africa and Asia: Xu, Gokana, and Mpi," Diachronica IX, No.2, Fall 1992.

"Cov, the Underspecified Noun, and Syntactic Flexibility in Hmong," Journal of the American Oriental Society 111, No. 4, Oct.-Dec. 1991.

Publications Available Through Amazon.com

Meaningful Tone : A Study of Tonal Morphology in Compounds, Form Classes and Expressive Phrases in White Hmong (Special Report Series, No 27)

Linguistic Fieldwork. with Paul Newman, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2001)

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