At Lake Michigan, Sept. 21, 2010

Chris Corcoran

PhD Student
Department of Linguistics
University of Chicago
1010 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637 USA
c-corcoran@uchicago.edu
Curriculum Vitae


Provisional dissertation title:
A study of linguistic categoriality with reference to Sherbro (Bullom) noun classes

Sherbro (Bullom) is an Atlantic, Niger-Congo language spoken in the coastal regions of Sierra Leone. Like many Niger-Congo languages, it has an elaborate noun class system. Very little contemporary work has been written on the language and nothing in the last forty years (Berry 1959, Pichl 1964, Mukarovsky 1965, Rogers 1967, 1970/71). Despite a long tradition among Sherbro speakers of Western education and early nineteenth century publications (Nyländer 1814a, 1814b, 1816a, 1816b; Kilham 1828, Schön 1839; Koelle 1854), no one is literate in Sherbro. No current reliable statistics on the number of speakers are available; however, a report (Thomas 2007) based on 2004 census data (and posted late 2011on the Sierra Leone Statistics Office site, www.statistics.sl) lists 65,736 Sherbro speakers, 1.3% of Sierra Leone’s total population.

The literature on the Sherbro noun class system is very limited, but it is consistent with much of the contemporary literature. For example, for Sherbro, Rogers (1967, 1970/71) identifies three of fourteen classes with limited semantic motivation and more generally concludes there are no organizing principles to describe. In the broader contemporary literature, many scholars conclude Niger-Congo noun class assignment is largely arbitrary (Corbett 1991, Maho 1999, Katamba 2003, Idiata 2005, Buell, Riedel, van der Wal 2011), or to the extent that semantic generalizations can be made, they represent the remnants of what was once a semantically cohesive system in an ancestral language (Givón 1971, Denny and Creider 1976, Williamson 1989, Williamson and Blench 2000 on Proto-Bantu; Childs 1995 on ancestor of Kisi, Southern Branch Atlantic).

However, more recently, a growing literature has developed that is interested in pursuing proposals for understanding noun class organization in Niger-Congo languages specifically: Breedeveld (1995a, 1995b) on Fulfulde; Moxley (1998) and Contini-Morava (1994, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2002, 2007, 2008a, 2008b) on Swahili; Selvik (1997, 2001) on Setswana; Palmer (1996), Palmer and Arin (1999), Palmer and Woodman (2000), and Palmer (2006) on Shona; Zawada and Ngcobo (2008) on Zulu; Hendrikse and Poulos (1994) on Southern Bantu; and Hendrikse (2001) on Bantu classes and polysemy.

Despite this more recent interest, I argue Spitulnik’s (1987) study of ChiBemba noun classes remains the most successful study to date. Her approach is drawn primarily from Silverstein (1976, 1981, 1985a, 1985b, 1986, 1987), work that also represents an articulation of the basis for Silverstein’s (1976) successful analysis of ‘split’ ergative systems. Making Spitulnik’s (1987) study our primary model, we propose Sherbro’s noun class system possesses a cohesive “sense”—simultaneously morphosyntactic and semantic—for the entire system that can be revealed by making theoretical distinctions between formal and notional categories and studying the markedness structures that order them.


Yillah, M. Sorie & Chris Corcoran. 2007. Krio (Creole English). In Comparative Creole syntax: Parallel outlines of eighteen Creole grammars. Westminster Creolistics Series 7, eds. John Holm and Peter L Patrick, 175–98. London: Battlebridge Publications.



Muana, Patrick K. and Chris Corcoran, eds. 2005. Representations of violence: Art about the Sierra Leone civil war. Madison, WI: 21st Century African Youth Movement.

Between 1998 and 2011, I produced linguistic reports in more than 40 asylum cases involving Sierra Leoneans seeking asylum in Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK. But from 2001 to 2003, I wrote a series of reports and letters on behalf of one asylum seeker in particular who had been denied asylum in the Netherlands based on a linguistic-analysis interview. In January of 2008, nearly a decade after his initial application, he was finally granted a residence permit. 

In the following article, I discuss sections of his first language-analysis interview, propose an explanation for some of his linguistic choices, discuss why the ensuing misunderstandings lead to his failed application, and conclude that linguistic identification in these cases cannot be made reliable:

Corcoran, Chris. 2004. A critical examination of the use of language analysis interviews in asylum proceedings: A case study of a West African seeking asylum in the Netherlands. International Journal of Speech, Language, and the Law: Forensic Linguistics 11 (2): 200–221. (Click here to go to the journal home page.)

From 2001 to December of 2008,  I worked in the Journals Division of the University of Chicago Press.  Most of my time was spent managing the production of these journals:

During my time at the Press, I also worked with these journals: