George Aaron Broadwell

George Aaron Broadwell

Elling Eide Professor of Anthropology

Chair, Department of Linguistics

Areas of Interest/Research

Linguistic anthropologist with primary research interest in syntactic theory, language documentation, and historical linguistics. Area specialization is Native American languages, with a particular research focus on Choctaw, Timucua, Copala Triqui, and Zapotec.

I was the 2023 recipient of the Victor Golla Prize from the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas.

Background

Education:

• Ph.D. UCLA (1990) Linguistics
• M.A., UCLA (1986) Linguistics
• B.A. Harvard (1983) Linguistics and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

Contact Information

Email: broadwell@ufl.edu
Phone: (352) 294-7598
Office: B364 TUR

Pronouns: he/him

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9184-3027

Research Interests

Linguistic anthropology, syntactic theory, language documentation, historical linguistics,  American Indian languages, Choctaw, Timucua, Copala Triqui, and Zapotec

Personal statement

My primary research agenda focuses on endangered languages, primarily Native American languages of the United States and Mesoamerica. I am interested in the issues of integrating language description and documentation with contemporary work in linguistic theory. I am also committed to working with Native American communities to provide dictionaries, texts, and other materials that are useful in language revitalization and maintenance.

My long-term descriptive commitments have been to grammatical and lexical descriptions of Choctaw, contemporary Zapotec (San Dionisio Ocotepec, Macuiltianguis, and Sierra Juarez varieties), Colonial Valley Zapotec, Copala Triqui, and Timucua. I have also worked on grammatical issues in a number of other languages around the world (Mon, Kaqchikel, Kiche, Yucatec,Turkish, Crow, Muskogee).

I am interested in theoretical problems that include word order, causative structures, lexical semantics, negation, diachronic morphosyntax, and syntactic typology.

I teach, advise, and am a member of the graduate faculty in both the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Linguistics at University of Florida. I am particularly interested in working with graduate students who are interested in a combination of linguistic and anthropological training. I believe that Anthropology and Linguistics both have an important contribution to make in doing good research on the languages of the world.

I was the Director of CoLang 2018, the Institute for Collaborative Language Research, which took place at University of Florida in summer 2018. This is a five-week training program in language documentation and community consultation.

Contributions to science

Documentation of contemporary languages of the Southeastern United States and Mesoamerica

I am currently engaged in fieldwork on Choctaw, Seminole Creek, and Copala Triqui, and I have also done work on several varieties of Zapotec and on several Mayan languages (Kaqchikel, K’ichee, and Yucatec.) I have been particularly interested in compiling dictionaries of these languages, collecting texts, and writing grammatical descriptions.

• Broadwell, George Aaron. (2023). Short and long past in Choctaw.  Proceedings of the 25^th Workshop on American Indian Languages. Santa Barbara, CA. https://www.wailconference.org/proceedings
• Broadwell, George Aaron. (2022). The emergence of accusative case in Copala Triqui. Linguistic Discovery 2:1-20. [Available online at https://journals.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/xmlpage/1/article/526.]
• Broadwell, George Aaron. (2020). Muskogean languages. in Routledge Handbook of North American Languages, edited by Daniel Siddiqi, Michael Barrie, Carrie Gillon, Jason Haugen, and Eric Mathieu. Routledge Press, pp 397-423.
• Albany Triqui Working Group. (2014-24). A Copala Triqui – Spanish – English dictionary http://copalatriqui.webonary.org
• Broadwell, George Aaron. (2014-24). A San Dionisio Ocotepec Zapotec – Spanish – English dictionary. http://sandionisiozapotec.webonary.org
• Broadwell, George A. (2015). Valence-changing morphology in San Dionisio Ocotepec Zapotec. in Natalie Operstein and Aaron Huey Sonnenschein, eds. Valence changes in Zapotec: Synchrony, Diachrony, Typology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 79-92.
• Broadwell, George Aaron. (2014). Language description and the lexicon: Verbs of wearing in two Oaxacan languages. In (Stefan Müller, ed.) Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, University at Buffalo. CSLI Publications: http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/HPSG/2014/broadwell.pdf.
• Vidal-Lopez, Román. (2012). Nana naguan’ rihaan nij síí chihaan’ | Consejos para la gente Triqui |   Word of counsel for the Triqui people. Edited by George A Broadwell, Ashley LaBoda, Sharone Horowit-Hendler, and Gabriela Aquino Dehesa. IMS Occasional Publication No. 16. Albany NY: University at Albany.
• Broadwell, George A; Castellucci, Gregg, and Megan Knickerbocker (2011). Toward an optimal account of partial agreement in Kaqchikel. in Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King, eds. Proceedings of the Lexical Functional Grammar 2011 conference. (Available at http://csli-publications.stanford.edu)
• Broadwell, George A. (2010). Two movement paradoxes in Zapotec. in Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King, eds. Proceedings of the Lexical Functional Grammar 2010 conference. (Available at http://csli-publications.stanford.edu)
• Broadwell, George A; Matsukawa, Kosuke; Martín del Campo, Edgar; Scipione, Ruth,; and Susan Perdomo (eds). (2009). The origin of the sun and moon: A Copala Triqui legend (Román Vidal López, narrator). Munich: Lincom Europa.
• Broadwell, George A. (2006). A Choctaw reference grammar. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
• Broadwell, George A. (2006). Valence, information structure, and passive constructions in Kaqchikel. in L. Kulikov, A. Malchukov, and P. de Swart, eds. Case, Valency, and Transitivity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 375-392.

Investigation of historic texts in Native American languages

In some parts of the Americas there are several centuries of writing in native languages. Working with material in languages such as Timucua, Choctaw, and Colonial Valley Zapotec requires a special set of theoretical and philological skills. I have been engaged in building resources (lexicons and text collections) for the study of these languages, and I have published on the grammar of Timucua and Zapotec and historical changes in their grammar. Brook Lillehaugen and I have collaborated for many years on building Ticha, an online collection of texts in Colonial Valley Zapotec.  Alejandra Dubcovsky and I have collaborated on many publications and co-curate Hebuano, a set of resources on the Timucua language.

• Broadwell, George Aaron and Timothy Johnson. (2024). Legacies of literacies: Fray Francisco Pareja and Timucuan communities in colonial Spanish Florida. In Catholicism and Native Americans in Early North America, edited by Katherine Deagan. University of Notre Dame. pp 107-134.
• Broadwell, George Aaron and Alejandra Dubcovsky. (2023). Chief Manuel’s 1651 Timucua letter: The oldest letter in a Native language of the United States. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 164(3/4), 225–267. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/article/919939
• McCarl, Clayton, Emma Slayton, Carolina Alzate, George Aaron Broadwell, Xóchitl Flores-Marcial, Brook Danielle Lillehaugen, Felipe H. Lopez, Siobhan Meï, May Helena Plumb, Ernesto Priani Saisó, and Jonathan Michael Square. (2023). “Colonial and Nineteenth-Century Latin American Studies and Digital Public Humanities,” in “DH Unbound 2022, Selected Papers,” ed. Barbara Bordalejo, Roopika Risam, and Emmanuel Château-Dutier, special issue. Digital Studies/Le champ numérique 13(3): 1–32. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.9601.
• Dubcovsky, Alejandra., & Broadwell, George.Aaron. (2023). “Anohebasisiro Nimanibota / We Want to Talk to the Honored One”: Timucua Language and its Uses, Silences, and Protests. Native American and Indigenous Studies 10(2), 69-100. doi:10.1353/nai.2023.a904183.
• Broadwell, George Aaron and Alejandra Dubcovsky. (2022) Hearing a Faint Voice: Timucua Words in a Catholic Miracle Story. The New American Antiquarian. 1:7-25. [Available at https://naajournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Broadwell-Dubcovsky-Hearing-a-Faint-Voice.pdf]
• Flores-Marcial, Xóchitl, Moisés García Guzmán, Felipe H. Lopez, George Aaron Broadwell, Alejandra Dubcovsky, May Helena Plumb, Mike Zarafonetis, and Brook Danielle Lillehaugen. (2021). Caseidyneën Saën – Learning Together: Colonial Valley Zapotec Teaching Materials. [Online book available at http://ds-wordpress.haverford.edu/ticha-resources/modules/]
•  Broadwell, George Aaron. (2021). The diachrony of the perfect in Zapotec. In The perfect volume: Papers on the perfect [Studies in Language Companion Series, 217], edited by Kristin Melum Eide and Marc Fryd. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 164-177. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.217.07bro
• Broadwell, George Aaron. (2021). Timucua hand use: Dispelling the claim of left-hand preference. New Florida Journal of Anthropology 1(2):18-29. https://doi.org/10.32473/nfja.v1i2.123622
• Broadwell, George Aaron (2021). The things they formerly worshipped: Timucua Christian texts on Native worship. in Facing Florida:Essays in culture and religion in early Southeastern America, edited by Timothy Johnson and Jeffrey Burns. Oceanside, CA: Academy of American Franciscan History, pp. 51-62.
• Broadwell, George Aaron; Moisés García Guzmán, Brook Danielle Lillehaugen, Felipe Lopez, May Helena Plumb, and Mike Zarafonetis. (2020). Ticha: Collaboration with indigenous communities to build digital resources on Zapotec language and history. Digital Humanities Quarterly vol 14, issue 4. http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/14/4/000529/000529.html
• Broadwell, George Aaron. (2016-2024). A Timucua-English dictionary. http://timucua.webonary.org.
• Broadwell, George A. (2019).  Honorific usage in Timucua exempla. in Preaching in New Worlds, edited by Timothy Johnson, Katherine Wrisbey Shelby, and John D. Young. Routledge . [Available as  Broadwell chapter Honorific Usage in timucua exempla from Preaching and New Worlds]
• Broadwell, George Aaron and Brook Danielle Lillehaugen. (2018). Building an electronic database for Colonial Valley Zapotec, International Journal of Linguistic Association of the Southwest 32(2):77-110.
• Broadwell, George A. (2017). Shadow Authors: The Texts of the Earliest Indigenous Florida Writers. In Franciscansand American Indians in Pan-Borderlands Perspective: Adaptation, Negotiation, and Resistance, J. Burns and Timothy Johnson, eds. Academy of American Franciscan History 161-174. [Available as Shadow authors.]
• Dubcovsky, Alejandra and George Aaron Broadwell. (2017) Writing Timucua, Recovering and Interrogating Indigenous Authorship. Early American Studies 15:409-441. [Available as .Writing Timucua.]
• Lillehaugen, Brook Danielle, George Aaron Broadwell, Michel R. Oudijk, Laurie Allen, May Plumb, and Mike Zarafonetis. (2016). Ticha: a digital text explorer for Colonial Zapotec, first edition. Online: http://ticha.haverford.edu/
• Broadwell, George Aaron. (2015). The historical development of the progressive aspect in Central Zapotec. International Journal of American Linguistics. 81:151–85.

A collection of Native Language resources in progress is available at this location: Historical texts in Native languages.

Syntactic theory

I am interested in a wide range of syntactic issues, including word order, control, binding theory, the morphology/syntax interface. I have worked in a variety of syntactic frameworks, including Principles and Parameters, Lexical-Functional Grammar, and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. I believe syntactic theory benefits from multiple theoretical perspectives and some degree of skepticism about our theoretical assumptions.

• Broadwell, George Aaron. (2023). Syntax in the clause. Chapter 12 of Handbook of languages and linguistics of North America, edited by Carmen Jany, Marianne Mithun, and Keren Rice. De Gruyter Mouton., pp 247-265.
• Broadwell, George Aaron. (2017). Parallel affix blocks in Choctaw. Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, University at Buffalo. CSLI Publications: http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/HPSG/2017/broadwell.pdf.
• Broadwell, George Aaron. (2014). Syntax from the Bottom up: Elicitation, Corpus Data, and Thick Descriptions. In (Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King, eds.) Proceedings of LFG14.   CSLI Publications: http://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/LFG/19/papers/lfg14broadwell.pdf
• Broadwell, George A. (2008). Turkish suspended affixation is lexical sharing. in Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King, eds. Proceedings of the Lexical Functional Grammar 2008 conference.(Available at http://csli-publications.stanford.edu)
• Broadwell, George A. (2007). Lexical sharing and non-projecting words: The case of Zapotec adjectives. in Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King, eds. Proceedings of the Lexical Functional Grammar 2007 conference. (Available at http://csli-publications.stanford.edu)
• Broadwell, George A. (2006). Alignment, precedence, and the typology of pied-piping with inversion. in Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King, eds. Proceedings of the Lexical Functional Grammar 2006 conference. (Available at http://csli-publications.stanford.edu)
• Broadwell, George A. (2005). It ain’t necessarily S(V)O: Two kinds of VSO languages. in Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King, eds. Proceedings of the Lexical Functional Grammar 2005 conference. (Available at http://csli-publications.stanford.edu)

Computational modeling of language

I worked for many years with the research group at University at Albany headed by Tomek Strzalkowski on computational modeling of sociolinguistic interaction and the indentification and classification of metaphor.

• Oliveira, Alandeom; Boz, Umit; Broadwell, George Aaron; and Troy Sadler. (2014). Student leadership in small group science inquiry. Research in Science & Technological Education 32:281-297.
• Broadwell, George Aaron; Jennifer Stromer-Galley; Tomek Strzalkowski; Samira Shaikh, Sarah Taylor, Umit Boz, Alana Elia, Laura Jiao, Ting Liu, and Nick Webb. (2012). Modeling socio-cultural phenomena in discourse. Journal of Natural Language Engineering
• Strzalkowski, Tomek; Samira Shaikh; Kit Cho; George Aaron Broadwell; Laurie Feldman; Sarah Taylor; Boris Yamrom; , Ting Liu; Ignacio Cases; Yuliya Peshkova; and Kyle Elliot. (2014). Computing Affect in Metaphors. Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Metaphor in NLP, pages 42–51, Baltimore, MD, USA.
• Strzalkowski, Tomek and George A Broadwell. (2013) Robust Extraction of Metaphors from Novel Data. NAACL Workshop on Metaphors in NLP.
• Strzalkowski, Tomek and George A Broadwell (2013) Influence and Power in Group Interactions. in (Ariel M. Greenberg, William G. Kennedy, Nathan D. Bos and Stephen Marcus,eds) Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction SBP 2013.
• Broadwell , George A; Boz, Umit; Cases, Ignacio; Strzalkowski, Tomasz; Feldman, Laurie; Taylor, Sarah; Cho, Kit; and Nick Webb. (2013) Using imageability and topic chaining to locate metaphors in linguistic corpora. in (Ariel M. Greenberg, William G. Kennedy, Nathan D. Bos and Stephen Marcus,eds) Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction SBP 2013.
• Strzalkowski, Tomek; George A Broadwell; Jennifer Stromer-Galley et al. (2011). Modeling Socio-Cultural Phenomena in Online Multi-Party Discourse. Proceedings of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 2011.

Research Support

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Florida

• 2018-2020
• CLAS Collaborative planning grant for a Quest course on Multlingualism – (co-convenor with Emily Hind)
•  $10,000

John Carter Library, Brown University

• Collaborative Cluster Fellowship, summer 2019
• Collaborative research on Timucua language materials with Alejandra Dubcovsky
• $2000

Other Completed Research Support

National Science Foundation, Documenting Endangered Languages

• 2017-2018
• CoLang 2018 – Institute for Collaborative Language Research
• Co-PIs Eric Potsdam, Brent Henderson, and James Essegbey
• $148,764

IARPA, Metaphor program

• 2012-2015
• REMND – Robust Extraction of Metaphors from Novel Data
• Co-PI with Tomek Strzalkowski (PI); Laurie Feldman (co-PI) and Sarah Taylor (co-PI)
• $5,504,316.65

IARPA, Socio-cultural Content in Language

• 2009 – 2012
• DSARMD – Detecting Social Actions and Roles in Multi-party Dialogue [co-PI with Tomek Strzalkowski (PI); Jennifer Strommer-Galley (co-PI) and Sarah Taylor (co-PI)]
• $1,903,041

Mailing address:

PO Box117305
Gainesville, FL 32611-7305