Dr. Harriet Sheppard

Discipline: Linguistics

Email: harriet.sheppard@usp.ac.fj

Office: 307, SPACE building, Laucala Campus

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8525-5699

Biography

I joined USP in 2024. Previously, I worked with the Language Data Commons of Australia at The University of Queensland and I have been a Postdoctoral Researcher at Monash University in the Linguistics Program. I hold a PhD and a BA (Hons) in linguistics, both from Monash University (Australia). As part of my PhD, I undertook research with the Vanatinai community in Milne Bay Province (Papua New Guinea) to document aspects of the Sudest language.

Educational background

PhD Linguistics (Monash University, Australia) BA languages and linguistics (Hons) (Monash University), Diploma of Modern Languages (Spanish) (Monash University).

Research Interests

My main research interests lie in the areas of language documentation and description and semantic and structural typology. I also have an interest in community-directed language work and language data management. My primary research focus is on languages of the Pacific region, particularly Oceanic languages. In my current research, I continue to investigate the Sudest language, a Western Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea, with a focus on verbal morphosyntax (including associated motion, classificatory verbs and multiverb constructions) and event expression. I am also currently working with colleagues on research investigating the expression of caused accompanied motion events (such as ‘bring’, ‘take’, ‘carry’) and their co-speech gestures across a number of languages including Sudest. For my PhD, I was part of a larger project investigating the cross-linguistic patterns in the encoding of three-participant events. I have also undertaken corpus-based language description using existing documentation data on Lau (Solomon Islands).

Expertise

I welcome proposals from potential research students interested in the areas of language documentation and grammatical description, including corpus-based approaches, linguistic typology, and event representation and semantic-syntax mapping.

Publications and presentations

Jorgensen, E, Margetts, A, Burke, I, & Sheppard, H (2023). Speech and gesture in the expression of caused motion events in Australian English. 7th meeting of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE7), The University of Queensland, Brisbane, June 19-23.

Margetts, A, Burke, I, Jorgensen, E, & Sheppard, H (2023). “Bring that goat home” and “fly them over the river” Directed caused accompanied motion in Australian English speech (and gesture). English Linguistics Seminar Series, Karlstad University, Sweden. May 05.

Sheppard, H, (2022). ‘Directed caused accompanied motion events in Sudest, an Oceanic language with classificatory verbs’, in A. Margetts, S. Riesberg, & B. Hellwig (eds.), Caused Accompanied Motion: Bringing and taking events in a cross-linguistic perspective, pp. 187–217, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam ; Philadelphia, doi:10.1075/tsl.134.07she.

Margetts, A, Haude, K, Himmelmann, NP, Jung, D, Riesberg, S, Schnell, S, Seifart, F, Sheppard, H, & Wegener, C (2022). ‘Cross-linguistic patterns in the lexicalisation of BRING and TAKE’, Studies in Language, doi: 10.1075/sl.19088.mar.

Sheppard, H (2022). ‘Vanga Vanatɨna (Sudest) corpus’, The Language Archive. https://hdl.handle.net/1839/a67b355f-a22d-4e86-a95d-e41a2674e196

Jorgensen, E, Margetts, A, Burke, I & Sheppard, H (2022). What counts as a relevant gesture in the study of multimodal event expression? ALS 2022 Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society. The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia. Nov 30 – Dec 2.

Sheppard, H (2022). Associated Motion in Sudest. APLL14 14th International Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics Conference. Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany. June 9-11.

Sheppard, H (2019). Classificatory verbs in Sudest. COOL11 11th Conference on Oceanic Linguistics. University of New Caledonia, Noumea, New Caledonia. October 7-11.

Margetts, A, Himmelmann, N, Riesberg, S, Sheppard, H, Schnell, S, & Thieberger, N (2019). BRING and TAKE: Caused accompanied motion events in Austronesian languages. 11th International Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics Conference, Leiden University, Netherlands. June 13-15.

Seifart, F, Schnell, S, Bardají, M, Döhler, C, Gipper, S, Hannß, K, Haude, K, Hellwig, B, Margetts, A, Riesberg, S, Sheppard, H, Thieberger, N, Wegener, C, Williams-van Klinken, C, Himmelmann, N P (2019). Typological causative prominence and causal verb text frequencies: Refinements based on language documentation corpora. 13th Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology, University of Pavia, Italy. September 4-6.

Sheppard, H (2016). Preverbal morphemes in Sudest, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea. ALS 2016 Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society. Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. December 7-9.