Research

[Jump to Past Projects]

Current Research

Publications

• 2019. Rikker Dockum and Claire Bowern. “Swadesh lists are not long enough: Drawing phonological generalizations from limited data.” Language Documentation and Description 16: 35-54. https://www.elpublishing.org/itempage/168
• 2019. Sarah Babinski, Rikker Dockum, Dolly Goldenberg, Hunter Craft, and Claire Bowern. “A Robin Hood approach to forced alignment: English-trained algorithms and their use on Australian languages.” Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 4. doi:10.3765/plsa.v4i1.4468
• 2018. Rikker Dockum. “Phylogeny in phonology: how Tai sound systems encode their past.” Supplemental Proceedings of the Annual Meeting on Phonology 2017. doi:10.3765/amp.v5i0.4238
• 2017. Rikker Dockum. “Computational modeling of tone in language documentation: citation tones vs. running speech in Chindwin Khamti.” Proceedings of the 43rd Berkeley Linguistics Society. doi:10.5281/zenodo.2575294

Manuscripts

• In review. Catherine Sheard, Claire Bowern, Rikker Dockum, and Fiona M. Jordan. “Pama-Nyungan grandparent systems change with grandchildren, but not cross-cousin terms.”
• In revision. Doug Whalen, Christian DiCanio, and Rikker Dockum. Phonetic documentation in three collections: topics and evolution.
• In prep. Rikker Dockum. “The Tonal Comparative Method: extending historical approaches to lexical tone.”
• In prep. Rikker Dockum. “Tone documentation conventions: issues for synchrony and diachrony.”
• In prep. Rikker Dockum. “Phonological traits in computational phylogenetics: tonal and segmental evidence.”
• In prep. Hadas Kotek, Rikker Dockum, Sarah Babinski, and Chris Geissler. “Gender bias in linguistic example sentences.”
• In prep. Sarah Babinski, Rikker Dockum, Hunter Craft, Dolly Goldenberg, and Claire Bowern. “Forced alignment methods for minority language fieldwork: comparison of methods using Australian language data.”
• In prep. Rikker Dockum. “Old Khmer did not have numeral classifiers: evidence from the epigraphic corpus.”

Editing

• 2016-Present. Editorial Advising Committee, Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society.
• 2014. Ryan Bennett, Rikker Dockum, Emily Gasser, Dolly Goldenberg, Ryan Kasak, and Patrick Patterson (eds). Proceedings of the Workshop on the Sound Systems of Mexico and Central America

Invited Talks

• 2018. “The Tonal Comparative Method: leveraging lexical tone in historical linguistics.” Annual Linguistics Homecoming Lecture. 23 October 2018, Dartmouth College.
• 2018. “Tonal recall: leveraging lexical tone to improve methods in historical linguistics.” Colloquium. 29 January 2018. University of California, Berkeley.

Conference Presentations

• 2019. Rikker Dockum. Is Tone Phonologically Atomic? The Significance of Syllable Shape in Tone Diachrony. 24th International Conference on Historical Linguistics.
  (ICHL24), Australian National University, Canberra, July 2019.
• 2019. Rikker Dockum. The Tonal Comparative Method: Leveraging Lexical Tone in Historical Linguistics. 24th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL24), Australian National University, Canberra, July 2019.
• 2019. Rikker Dockum and Pittayawat Pittayaporn. Dating the emergence of phonemic length contrasts in แ- /æ/ and -อ /ɔ/ in Standard Thai. 29th Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (SEALS 29). 27-29 May 2019, Tokyo, Japan.
• 2019. Rikker Dockum. Lexical tone and the Comparative Method: Distinguishing innovation, retention, and chance resemblance. 93rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA 2019). 2-6 January 2019, New York City, NY.
• 2019. Sarah Babinski, Rikker Dockum, Dolly Goldenberg, Hunter Craft, Anelisa Fergus, and Claire Bowern. A Robin Hood approach to Forced Alignment: English-trained algorithms and their use on Australian languages. 93^rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA 2019). 3-6 January 2019, New York City, NY. doi:10.5281/zenodo.2557247 [Slides]
• 2018. Doug Whalen, Christian DiCanio, and Rikker Dockum. Phonetic documentation in the literature: Coverage rates for topics and languages. 176th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA). 5-9 November 2018, Victoria, Canada.
• 2018. Rikker Dockum. Basic word order in Tai Khamti: language contact with Burmese. 13th International Burma Studies Conference. 3-5 August 2018, Bangkok.
• 2018. Rikker Dockum. Revisiting the Tai Khamti constituent order debate: New data from Myanmar. 28th Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (SEALS28). 17-19 May 2018, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
• 2018. Rikker Dockum. Undocumented labor: how old fieldwork sheds new light on Tai tone system diversification. 92^nd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA 2018). 4-7 January 2018, Salt Lake City, UT. doi:10.5281/zenodo.1136317 [Slides]
• 2017. Rikker Dockum and Ethan Campbell-Taylor. When enough is enough: Drawing linguistic generalizations from limited data. 12^th Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT 2017). 12-14 December 2017, Australian National University: Canberra, Australia. [Slides]
• 2017 Rikker Dockum. Tone system diversification: Data and trends from dialect surveys of Thailand. Triggers of language change in the Language Sciences (XLanS 2017). 11-13 October 2017, Université Lumière Lyon 2: Lyon, France.
• 2017. Rikker Dockum. Phylogeny in phonology: how Tai sound systems encode their past. Annual Meeting on Phonology 2017 (AMP 2017). 15-17 September 2017, New York University: New York, NY. doi:10.5281/zenodo.1158348 [Poster] [Paper]
• 2017. Rikker Dockum and Ethan Campbell-Taylor. Wordlists for language documentation: Are we gathering too little data? International Conference on Language Studies 2017 (iCLS 2017). 9-10 August 2017, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak: Kuching, Malaysia.
• 2017. Rikker Dockum. Class term doubling in Tai Khamti: Reanalysis, reinforcement, and sesquisyllables. 27^th Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (SEALS27). 11-13 May 2017, Padang, Indonesia.
• 2017. Rikker Dockum. Prosodic context in computational modeling of tone: citation tones vs. running speech. 43^rd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS43). 3-5 February 2017, University of California, Berkeley: Berkeley, CA. [Slides] [Paper]
• 2017. Rikker Dockum. Double marking in Tai Khamti: Reanalysis and reinforcement. Diachronic morphology: Theoretical, areal, and phylogenetic perspectives. 26-27 January 2017, University of Zurich: Zurich, Switzerland.
• 2017. Rikker Dockum. Tone analysis in Tai Khamti: Computational models in language documentation. 91^st Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA 2017). 5-8 January 2017: Austin, TX.
• 2016. Rikker Dockum. Numeral classifiers in areal perspective: Khmer and Thai ‘syntactic borrowing’ revisited. Austroasiatic Syntax in Areal and Diachronic Perspective. Workshop of the Austroasiatic Working Group. September 5-7, 2016. [Slides]
• 2016. Rikker Dockum. Tone analysis in Southeast Asia: Computational modeling & traditional methods. SEALS 2016. 26^th Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (SEALS26). 26-28 May 2016, Manila, Philippines. [Slides]
• 2016. Rikker Dockum. Tonal evidence in historical linguistics: genetic signal or typological noise? 42^nd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS42). 5-7 February 2016, University of California, Berkeley: Berkeley, CA. [Slides]
• 2015. Rikker Dockum. Sanskrit Loanword Adaptation in Old Thai: Epigraphic Evidence from the Sukhothai Corpus. 16^th World Sanskrit Conference of the International Association of Sanskrit Studies (IASS). 28 June-2 July 2015, Silpakorn University: Bangkok, Thailand. [Slides]
• 2015. Rikker Dockum. Burma Khamti and Language Classification in Southwestern Tai. 25^th Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (SEALS25). 27-29 May 2015, Payap University: Chiang Mai, Thailand. [Slides]
• 2013. Rikker Dockum. Towards a Regional Convention for Epigraphic Transliteration of Southeast Asia’s Brahmic Scripts. 46^th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (ICSTLL46). 7-10 August 2013, Dartmouth College: Hanover, NH. [Slides]
• 2008. Doug Cooper and Rikker Dockum. Thai in Transition and the Thai Gigaword/Terabyte Web Corpus. National Language Policy: Language Diversity for National Unity. 4-5 July 2008: Bangkok, Thailand.
• 2007. Rikker Dockum. From Lost to Online: A Digital eText + Image Edition of the First Thai-English Dictionary. 17^th Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (SEALS17). 31 August-2 September 2007, University of Maryland, College Park: College Park, MD. [Slides]
• 2006. Rikker Dockum. Convergences in Khumi and Marma Morphosyntax. 39^th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (ICSTLL39). 14-17 September 2006, University of Washington: Seattle, WA. [Handout]

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[Jump to Current Research]

Past Projects

Here are some of the projects I have created or worked on:

Lexical databases

• Contemporary and Historical Reconstruction in the Indigenous Languages of Australia (CHIRILA). NSF grants BCS-0844550, BCS-1423711. [paper]
• The Asia-Pacific Linguistic Data Warehouse. CRCL. [paper]

Digital dictionaries and text corpora

• Contemporary
  • The SEAlang Library (U.S. Dept. of Ed. TICFIA grant P337A050018)
• Historical
  • Eliza Grew Jones 1833 manuscript Thai-English dictionary
  • Dan Beach Bradley 1873 Dictionary of the Siamese Language (Thai-Thai)
  • Jesse Caswell & J.H. Chandler 1846 manuscript Thai-Thai dictionary (website fc.)
  • E.B. Michell 1892: A Siamese-English Dictionary (website fc.)

Archival scanning and indexing

• Project Gutenberg Thailand
• The Southeast Asian Linguistics Archive (SALA)
• Pacific Linguistics Publication Archive (1964-2012)
• Christian Bauer’s Ananda “Basement” Plaques
• NUSA Archive – Linguistic Studies of the Languages of Indonesia (Vols. 1-53, 1975-2004)

Assistive technology for learning Thai

• SEAlang Thai Vocabulary: 100s of semantically organized vocabulary lists
• The SEAlang Lab (U.S. Dept. of Ed. IRS grant P017A060058)
• The SEAlang Library Thai Bitext Corpus (U.S. Dept. of Ed. TICFIA grant P337A050018)

Epigraphy of Southeast Asia

• The Sukhothai Inscriptions of Thailand. 2009 Fulbright grant project. Produced the first full roman transliteration of the Sukhothai epigraphic corpus (13^th-15^th century); etymological tagging of Khmer, Pali and Sanskrit loanwords.
• Greater Southeast Asia epigraphic transliteration standardization project. Draft proposal for a regional transliteration convention for GSEA; encompassing scripts for archaic variants of Khmer, Mon, Thai, Burmese, Lao, Malay, Javanese, Balinese, Cham, and Pyu (Presented at ICSTLL 46).
• Entity tagging of the Old Thai and Old Khmer corpora: analyzing and tagging all dates, people, places, and material culture items.