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Doctor of Philosophy (Ph. D.), Department of Linguistics / Rice University

Master of Arts (M.A.), Department of Linguistics / Rice University

Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.), Universidade Federal de Pernambuco

Prof. (Dr.) Sergio Meira de Santa Cruz Oliveira

Professor, Centre for Foreign Languages

Email sergiomdsc.oliveira@jgu.edu.in
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Key Expertise Historical-Comparative Linguistics, Descriptive Linguistics, Typological Linguistics, South American Indigenous Languages, Cariban Family, Tupian Family, Arawakan Family

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph. D.), Department of Linguistics / Rice University

Master of Arts (M.A.), Department of Linguistics / Rice University

Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.), Universidade Federal de Pernambuco

Biography

SÉRGIO MEIRA DE SANTA CRUZ OLIVEIRA was born in Recife, Brazil, in Dec. 31, 1968. After completing primary and secondary education, Dr. Meira studied physics for eight semesters at the Federal University of Pernambuco (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco), after which he transferred to the Ph. D. program in linguistics at the Linguistics Department of Rice University. He obtained his M. A. in 1998 (on the reconstruction of the proto-language of the Taranoan branch of the Cariban language family) and his Ph. D. in 1999 (on the grammatical description of Tiriyó, a Cariban language). His Ph. D. dissertation received the Maria Sklodiewska award for best dissertation in the languages and humanities at Rice University, and the annual award of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA). After that, Dr. Meira taught at Rice University for a semester, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik in Nijmegen (Nimwegen), The Netherlands. After that, Dr. Meira taught at Leiden University, in Leiden, for about 6 years, and then at the Universidade Federal de Roraima, in Brazil, for another couple of years. During this period, his research interests included: the Cariban language family, the Tupian language family, historical-comparative linguistics, descriptive linguistics, structural linguistics, and cognitive linguistics, all of which areas in which Dr. Meira published a number of scholarly articles and a book. He is currently at the Office of English and Foreign Languages of O. P. Jindal Global University, where he teaches courses related to linguistics and language learning, and continues his historical-comparative research on the Cariban and Tupian language families.

Spanish Level 7

German Level 1

German Level 2

German Level 3

German Level 4

German Level 5

German Level 7

Spanish Level 1

Introduction to Linguistics

Language, Society, and Politics

Maria Sklodiewska Award (1999)

SSILA Annual Award (1999)

Tiriyó, Sateré-Mawé, Katxuyana (DoBeS, 2006)

Peer reviewer, International Journal of American Linguistics, 2002

Peer reviewer, International Journal of American Linguistics, 2004

Peer reviewer, International Journal of American Linguistics, 2009

Peer reviewer, International Journal of American Linguistics, 2012

Peer reviewer, International Journal of American Linguistics, 2013

SSILA (Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas)

ABRALIN (Associação Brasileira de Linguística / Linguistics Association of Brazil)

Development of a computer database for Cariban comparative vocabulary (FileMaker Pro), including data entry (currently over 10,000 words entered).

Development of methods for the comparative study of adpositional systems (MPI - Nijmegen). 

Mudança sintática em andamento: o caso dos “classificadores genitivos” em línguas caribe. Moara 43(2):82-103.

(with A. V. Galucio, S. Drude, N. Gabas, Jr., D. Moore, G. Picanço, C. R. Rodrigues, L. Storto) Genealogical relations and lexical distances within the Tupian linguistic family. Boletim do Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, série Ciências Humanas, 10(2):229-274.

(with S. Drude). A preliminary reconstruction of proto-Maweti-Guarani segmental phonology. Boletim do Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, série Ciências Humanas, 10(2):275-296.

(with L. Michael, N. Chousou-Polydouri, K. Bartolomei, E. Donnelly, V. Wauters & Z. O’Hagan). A Bayesian phylogenetic classification of Tupí-Guaraní. LIAMES 15(2):193-221.

(with S. Drude) Sobre a origem histórica dos “prefixos relacionais” das línguas Tupí-Guaraní [On the historical origin of the “relational prefixes” of the Tupí-Guaraní languages]. Cadernos de Etnolingüística 5(1):1-30.

Tiriyo. Dictionnaire des langues, Emilio Bonvini, Joëlle Busuttil and Alain Peyraube (eds.), 1495-1501. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

(with S. Gildea and B. J. Hoff) On the origin of ablaut in the Cariban family. International Journal of American Linguistics 76(4):477-515.

(with S. Gildea and B. J. Hoff) The story of *ô in the Cariban family. Fieldwork and Linguistic Analysis in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, ed. by Andrea L. Berez, Jean Mulder, and Daisy Rosenblum, 91-123. Language Documentation and Conservation Special Publication No. 2. Available online at http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/ and http://hdl.handle.net/10125/4452.

(with L. Wetzels). A survey of South American stress systems. In A Survey of word accentual patterns in the languages of the world, ed. por H. van der Hulst, R. Goedemans e E. van Zanten, pp. 313–380. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton.

(with S. Gildea) Property concepts in the Cariban family: adjectives, adverbs, and/or nouns? The linguistics of endangered langugaes: contributions to morphology and syntax, ed. by L. Wetzels, 95-134. Utrecht, The Netherlands: LOT. (Available at http://lotos.library.uu.nl/publish/articles/000334/bookpart.pdf)

Orações relativas em línguas Karíb [Relative clauses in Cariban languages]. Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, Ciências Humanas, vol. 2, n. 1, 105-121.

Syntactic reanalysis in Yukpa (Cariban). International Journal of American Lin- guistics 72:135-150.

Stative verbs vs. nouns in Sateré-Mawé and the Tupian family. What’s in a verb? Studies in the verbal morphology of the languages of the Americas, ed. by Grażyna J. Rowicka and Eithne B. Carlin, 189-214. LOT Occasional Series. Utrecht, The Netherlands: LOT

Tiriyó body part terms. Language Sciences 28:262-279

Reconstructing Pre-Bakairi segmental phonology. Anthropological Linguistics 47, no. 3, 1-32.

Mawé stative verbs and predicate possession. Guaraní y “Mawetí-Tupí-Guaraní”: Estudios históricos y descriptivos sobre una familia lingüística de América del Sur, ed. by Wolf Dietrich and Haralambos Symeonidis, 47-68. Regionalwissenschaft Lateinamerika, vol. 11. Lateinamerika-Zentrum der Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität Münster. Berlin: LIT Verlag.

Approaching space in Tiriyó grammar. Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cog-nitive Diversity, ed. by S. C. Levinson and D. Wilkins, 311-358. Language, Culture and Cogniation Series, vol. 6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

(with B. Franchetto) The southern Cariban languages and the Cariban family. In- ternational Journal of American Linguistics 71: 127-192.

(with A. Terrill) Contrasting contrastive demonstratives in Tiriyó and Lavukaleve. Linguistics 43-6:1131-1152.

Cariban languages. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edition, ed. by Keith Brown, 199-204. Oxford: Elsevier.

The Cariban-Tupi (Ka-Tu) hypothesis: state of the question. Paper presented (as an invited speaker) at the II CILLA (Congreso de Idiomas Indígenas de Latino- américa [Conference on Latin American Indigenous Languages]), Austin, Texas, Oct. 27-29, 2005.

Multiple number marking in Cariban. Paper presented at the colloquium The Interaction of Gender and Number in the World’s Languages, Leiden, The Netherlands, Oct. 11, 2005.

The Reconstruction of Maweti-Guarani. Paper presented (with Sebastian Drude) at the Simpósio Internacional sobre Lingüística Histórica na América do Sul [International Symposium on Historical Linguistics in South America], Belém, Brazil, Aug. 27 - Sep. 2, 2005.

Morfologia vs. semântica, ou intransitividade cindida em Tiriyó (Karíb). [Mor- phology vs. semantics, or split intransitivity in Tiriyó (Cariban).] Atas do II Encontro Nacional do Grupo de Estudos de Linguagem do Centro-Oeste (Goiânia, 8-10 de outubro de 2003), org. by Denize Elena Garcia da Silva, vol. 1, 261-270. Brasília: Universidade de Brasília (UnB). (http://www.unb.br/gelco/).

Mental state postpositions in Tiriyó and other Cariban languages. Linguistic Typo- logy 8:213-241.

O lingüista e a ortografia indígena: o caso da língua Bakairi. [The linguist and the indigenous orthography: the case of the Bakairi language.] Revista de Estudos e Pesquisas, vol. 1, n. 2, 73-99. Brasília: FUNAI (Fundação Nacional do Índio).

Coreferentiality and ergativity in Bakairi. Paper presented at the III Ergativité en Amazonie [Ergativity in Amazonia] conference, CELIA/CNRS, Paris, Nov. 30 - Dec. 4, 2004.

My knife = I have a knife: The structure of possessive predicates in Sateré-Mawé (Tupian). Paper presented at the I SWL (Syntax of the World’s Languages) conference, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Aug. 5-8, 2004.

‘Addressee effects’ in demonstrative systems: the cases of Tiriyó and Brazilian Portuguese. Deictic conceptualization of space, time and person, ed. by Friedrich Lenz, 3-12. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, vol. 112. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

(with S. Levinson) ‘Natural concepts’ in the spatial topological domain — adposi-tional meanings in cross-linguistic perspective: an exercise in semantic typology. Language 79:485-516.

Primeras observaciones sobre la lengua yukpa [First notes on the Yukpa language]. Lingua Americana [Revista de lin- güística del Instituto de Investigaciones Literarias y Lingüísticas de la Universidad del Zulia, Maracaibo, Venezuela] 12:113-138.

Les démonstratifs proximaux non-animés de la langue tiriyo (caribe): une étude de corpus. [The proximal non-animate demonstratives of the Tiriyó lan- language (Cariban): a corpus study.] Amérindia 28 (langues caribes): 183-200.

O sistema de marcação de pessoa da língua Bakairí [The person-marking system of the akairi language]. Paper presented at the II Ergavité en Amazonie [Ergativity in Amazonia] conference, University of Brasília, Brasília, Oct. 27-30, 2003.

Sujeito cindido em línguas Karíb: um epifenômeno? [Split-S in Cariban languages: an epiphenomenon?]. Paper presented at the II National Meeting of GELCO (Group for the Study of Language in the Center/West), Goiânia, Oct. 8-11, 2003.

Estratégias de relativização em línguas Karíb [Relativization strategies in Cariban languages). Paper presented at the III International Congress of ABRALIN (Brazilian Association of Linguistics), Rio de Janeiro, Mar. 13-15, 2003

A first comparison of pronominal and demonstrative systems in the Cariban language family. Current studies in South American languages, ed. by M. Crevels, S. van der Kerke, S. Meira, & H. van der Voort, 255-275. Indigenous Languages of Latin America (ILLA) series, vol. 3. Leiden: Research School of Asian, African, and Amerindian Studies (CNWS), University of Leiden, The Netherlands.

Patterns of semantic discrimination in spatial adpositional systems (with Stephen C. Levinson). Paper presented at the International Conference on Adpositions of Movement, University of Leuven (Belgium), Jan. 14-16, 2002.

Tiriyó (Karib): Ein typologischer Überblick [Tiriyó (Carib): a typological overview]. Paper presented at the Sprachwissenschaftliche Werkstatt [Linguistic Workshop], University of Cologne, Jan. 8, 2002

Paradox escaped? Cognitive Linguistics 12-1, 89-96.

Linguistic theory and linguistic description: the case of Tiriyó [h]. International Journal of American Linguistics 67:119-135

Faire de la linguistique historique en Amazonie [Doing historical linguistics in Amazonia]. Paper presented at the Journées ‘Faire du Continu avec du Discontinu: Terrains Amazoniens’ [Shaping the Continuous out of the Discontinuous: Amazonian Examples], University of Paris X, Nanterre, Nov. 30 - Dec. 1, 2001.

Comparing Tupi and Carib: methodological questions and preliminary results. Paper presented at the ‘New Methods in Genetic Language Comparsion’ Colloquium, University of Erfurt (Germany), Nov. 9-10, 2001

The Cariban family: a typological overview. Paper presented at the IV Meeting of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT), Santa Barbara, California (USA), July 19-21, 2001.

Comparing the exophoric use of demonstratives: Tiriyó (Cariban) and spoken Brazilian Portuguese (Romance). Paper presented at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the DGfS (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, German Linguistics Society), Leipzig, Feb. 28 - March 2, 2001.

(ed., with Michael Dunn). Demonstratives: a comparative study.

Non-contrastive exophoric uses of Tiriyó demonstratives. In 2001a.

(with Raquel Guirardello). Non-contrastive exophoric uses of demonstratives in

Brazilian Portuguese. In 2001a.

(with Michael Dunn, Angela Terrill, and Anna Margetts). 1/0-Positional languages. In Linguistics (special issue on positional verbs).

A Reconstruction of Proto-Taranoan: Phonology and Morphology. München: LINCOM Europa.

The accidental intransitive split in the Cariban family. Reconstructing grammar: comparative linguistics and grammaticalization, ed. by Spike Gildea, 201-230. Typological Studies in Language (TSL), vol. 43. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Reduplication in Tiriyó (Cariban). Languages of the World, n. 17. München: LINCOM Europa.

The Demonstrative System of Tiriyó, and Other Cariban Languages. Paper presented at the 50th International Congress of Americanists, July 10-14 2000, Warsaw, Poland.

Constituintes em Tiriyó (Karíb) [Constituents in Tiriyó (Cariban)]. Paper presented at the Conferência “A Estrutura das Línguas Brasileiras” [Conference on the Structure of Brazilian Languages], March 17-29 2000, Petrópolis, Brazil.

A Grammar of Tiriyó. Ph. D. Dissertation, Department of Linguistics, Rice University. Forthcoming as A grammar of Tiriyó.

Syllable reduction and ghost syllables in Tiriyó. XXV LACUS Forum, ed. by Shin Ja J. Hwang & Arle R. Lommel, 125-131. Fullerton, CA: The Linguistic Associa- tion of Canada and the United States (LACUS).

Roles and Nominalizations in Tiriyó. Exposition made at the Colloquium of the Rice University Department of Linguistics, May 1999.

Nominalizations in Tiriyó. Exposition made at the Languages of Surinam (Talen van Suriname) Meeting at Leiden University, Leiden (The Netherlands), January 1999.

A Reconstruction of Proto-Taranoan: Phonology and Inflectional Morphology. Master’s Thesis, Department of Linguistics, Rice University.

Rhythmic stress in Tiriyó (Cariban). International Journal of American Linguistics, vol. 64, no. 4, 352-378.

Some Observations on Comparative Cariban Kinship Terminology. (To appear in the Proceedings of the Carib Studies in the Guianas Workshop)

Some Observations on Comparative Cariban Kinship Terminology. Paper presented at the Carib Studies in the Guianas Workshop, Georgetown, August 1998.

Constituency, Semi-Constituency, and Quasi-Constituency in Tiriyó. Paper presented at the Meeting of SSILA - Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, January 1998.

[f], [ñ] e [h]: Fonogênese em Tiriyó (Karíb). Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, série Antropologia, vol. 13(2), 167-178.

La famille linguistique caribe [The Cariban language family]. Exposition made at the Journée d’Orthographe Kali’na, Awala-Yalimapo (French Guiana), Oct 4, 1997.

The Genesis of an Epiphenomenal Split-S System in Cariban Languages. Paper presented at the VII Biennial Rice University Symposium on Linguistics: The Interface Between Comparative Linguistics and Grammaticalization Theory: Languages of the Americas, March 26-29, 1997.

Split intrasitivity in Tiriyó / Cariban. Paper presented to the Rice Linguistics Department, Feb. 21, 1996

A sketch of 19th-century Bakairí phonology and morphology. (50p)

From adverbializer to tense marker in Tiriyó . Paper presented at the Meeting of SSILA - Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, July 1995.

The evolution of split ergativity in Tiriyó. Research results presented during the workshop on the grammatical description of Cariban languages, Houston, USA, June 1995.

Phonetic correlates of Tiriyó rhythmic stress. (12p)

Rhythmic Stress and Syllable Reduction in Tiriyó. Research results presented at: Quintas Lingüísticas do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, August 25, 1994

Problemas com a análise do morfema -se/-ye/-e/- em Tiriyó (Problems with the analysis of the morpheme -se/-ye/-e/- in Tiriyó). Paper presented at the IX Meeting of ANPOLL - Associação Nacional dos Cursos de Pós-Graduação em Letras e Lingüística (National Association of Graduate Programs in Linguistics and Literature), June 15, 1994, Caxambu, Minas Gerais.

Person-Marking Systems of Tiriyó (Cariban). Trabalho apresentado no II Seminário de Iniciação Científica do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, 11 de maio de 1994, Belém, Pará.

The Active/Stative System of Tiriyó (Cariban) (10p)

'To know' or 'not to know' (perchance 'to want'): typologically unusual postpositions in Tiriyó (Cariban) (10p)
Email sergiomdsc.oliveira@jgu.edu.in
Key Expertise Historical-Comparative Linguistics, Descriptive Linguistics, Typological Linguistics, South American Indigenous Languages, Cariban Family, Tupian Family, Arawakan Family
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