DeAndré A. Espree-Conaway

I am a field linguist and Ph.D. student in linguistics. My research investigates the evolution of linguistic diversity, with an eye towards the diversity of languages of the South Pacific (Kayanic languages of Borneo and Rai Coast languages of New Guinea). My work has taken me to 30 countries, including Oceanic nations such as Indonesia (Borneo, West Papua), Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, New Zealand, and French Polynesia.

For me, the most important questions in language science are: What is language? And where does it come from? Taking a page out of Heraclitus’ book, ‘the only constant in life (and language) is change.’ Language is a complex adaptive system wherein the dynamics of language change (specifically the mechanisms of language diversification) adapt to the ecological conditions under which speakers live and interact. This ‘language ecology’ may create learning biases that shape the development of a given language. I suspect we might be able to get a glimpse of the true nature of language and its origins through this line of inquiry.

My main areas of focus are include language documentation and conservation, morphosyntax, language typology, semantics, historical linguistics, and linguistic anthropology in Austronesian and Papuan. I also have strong interests and experience in evolutionary linguistics, field-based psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. I also have experience in and Oto-Manguean (Mixtec[an]) and Indo-European (Romance, Germanic, Celtic). My particular interests center around voice systems and attention mechanisms, adpositions (along with other aspects of spatial grammar) and spatial cognition, affective grammar and emotional cognition, and complex predication (serial verb constructions, etc.).

I’m also interested in how the ecology of brains, bodies, genes, cultures, societies, and geographies mold languages, producing the diversity (or lack thereof) of languages we see today. To this end, I draw from a wide range of interdisciplinary methodological tools to answer questions concerning the nature and evolution of language.

I’m currently seeking collaborations in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. I’m interested in combining language description with neuroimaging methods (fNIRS-EEG and fMRI). I’m also open to collaborative projects in other areas of evolutionary linguistics, including primatology (primate vocalization semantics, primate gesture), animal communication, paleoanthropology, genetics, and statistical physics.

For my dissertation, I am writing a reference grammar of Wehea, a dayak language of Borneo. The current working title is The Wehea Language: A Reference Grammar of a Dayak Language of Borneo (East Kalimantan, Indonesia), with Theoretical Notes on Voice Systems. In addition to traditional language documentation and description, this project incorporates field-based psycholinguistic methods. I’m also involved in grammatical description work on Arawum (Papua New Guinea), African-American English (USA), South African Gujarati (South Africa), and Mixtec (Mexico).

In addition to linguistics, I’m a language learning enthusiast. I blog and vlog about language learning on the Taking Down Tongues website and my youtube channel. I also love documentaries (watching and filming them) and traveling. Being the adventure-loving soul I am, I’ve trekked the perimeter of Tahiti and sailed the Tuamotu Islands of Polynesia by cargo ship. I am the founder and CEO of the Bloomfield Language Institute.