Thursday, August 4, 2011

Back to Work

After a couple of months of teaching Albanian at Arizona State's Critical Language Institute, I am back on my dissertation. Teaching was a great experience, and it certainly helped me tune up my Albanian, but now it's time to turn my full attention back to writing. First item of business is to finish the writing on the vocabulary chapter (Ch. 3) that I put together for a presentation at the University of Chicago. Here is a link to the handout that I made for that presentation. Right now, I am writing the handout into an article, perhaps to be published as a part of the proceedings from that conference, perhaps as an article somewhere else.

I wish that I could just take this article as a full chapter in the dissertation, but I need to modify it in a couple of ways: expand the scope of the territory covered in the article. The two main sources that I have relied on so far for borrowings from Slavic into Albanian (Gunar Svane, Slavische Lehnwörter im Albanischen, 1992; Xhelal Ylli, Das slavische Lehngut im Albanischen, 1997) disregard contact between Slavic and Albanian in the former Yugoslavia. That is why I will be looking for more work on the matter in the next couple of days.

A second modification (which is also the case with the chapters on morphology and phonology) is that I need to take some of the introductory material about sociolinguistic setting and theoretical discussions out of these individual pieces and combine them with the material in the first two chapters that give those backgrounds to the entire dissertation.

But first, to finish the article at hand...