Donna Gerdts facts for kids

Donna B. Gerdts (Halkomelem: Sp’aqw’um’ultunaat) is a professor of linguistics at Simon Fraser University. She also helps lead the First Nations Languages Program there. A linguist studies how languages work. Donna Gerdts is especially interested in how sentences are built, which is called syntax. She has studied the Halkomelem language, spoken by Indigenous peoples in Canada, and the Korean language a lot.

Professor Gerdts has created many helpful materials for learning Halkomelem. She is still researching this language with support from a Canadian research council. She is interested in how languages are put together, how they are similar or different, and how words change their form.

Donna Gerdts earned her PhD in Linguistics from the University of California at San Diego. She was the editor of the International Journal of American Linguistics for several years. She also helped start and is on the board of the Northwest Journal of Linguistics. She worked as an editor for Language, a journal from the Linguistic Society of America. In 2008, she was the president of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas.

What Donna B. Gerdts Studies

Donna Gerdts has studied and written a lot about the Halkomelem language and the Korean language. She also came up with her own idea about how language grammar works, called "Mapping Theory." This idea is based on another theory called Relational grammar. She has also made great learning tools for Halkomelem. These include a talking dictionary and school materials for students and teachers in the Nanaimo School District.

Her Ideas About Language: Mapping Theory

Donna Gerdts introduced "Mapping Theory" in 1992. This theory helps explain how the different parts of a sentence (like the subject or object) connect to how words change their form. It looks at how grammar works without needing many steps in between. Instead of using a fixed list of grammar roles, Mapping Theory focuses on "morphosyntactically-licensed argument positions," or MAPs. These are like specific spots where words fit in a sentence based on their form.

How Halkomelem Works

In an article from 1993, Gerdts looked closely at the grammar of Halkomelem. She showed how the way a language is built connects to her Mapping Theory. She explained that Halkomelem is a "direct object-centered language." This means that many grammar rules in Halkomelem focus on the "object" of a sentence. The idea of an "indirect object" doesn't seem to be as important in this language.

How Korean Works

In another article from 1993, Gerdts used Mapping Theory to describe Korean grammar. She found that Korean is a "2-MAP language." This means it mainly uses two main positions for words in its sentences. This was interesting because Korean sometimes acts like languages that have more MAPs.

Teaching Languages

Professor Gerdts teaches classes about the languages of the First Nations in Canada. These are the native languages spoken by Indigenous peoples in southern Canada. She teaches about how stories are told in these languages. She also teaches about how words are built (morphology) and how sentences are put together (syntax). Her classes also cover the cultural and thinking aspects of First Nation Languages. She also teaches general linguistics courses, like how to study a language in the field.

Many of her students have gone on to write important papers for their degrees. They have studied a wide range of languages. These include Arabic, ASL, Azeri, Breton, Hausa, Kashmiri, Koine Greek, Korean, Kunuz Nubian, Okanagan, and Shuswap.