I am now in New Zealand as a visiting Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury, teaching syntax, meeting students, and taking part in field methods (Kiribati is the language and it has fascinating directional constructions and mysterious verbal suffixes). Plus meeting members of the Niuean community and doing a little field work on Vagahau Niue (Niuean). It has been an interesting time, with 348 earthquakes since I got here on Sept 14th (out of a total of 1448) until today, Oct 4th, 8 pm. It has been great to see a second Spring this year! I went to Wellington to give a talk too, where I saw Naomi and Jack's pictures in the Sociolinguistics Hall of Fame. Here is a picture of me with Ofania Ikiua, consultant extraordinaire for Vagahau Niue, and my co-author for two papers on Niuean. She is a senior analyst with the NZ Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs. During my time here, I have found out interesting things about Niuean cognate object constructions, focus, causatives and a little bit about pro-drop.
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