Woman of Indian descent wearing rounded glasses and a yellow shirt smiling broadly.

Felicia Bisnath

[fə.ˈliː.s(ɪ).jə̞ ˈbɪs.næːθ]

she/her

fbisnath at umich dot edu

CV

I am a fifth year PhD student of linguistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor advised by Dr. Savithry Namboodiripad and working with the Contact, Cognition and Change Lab and the Cognition, Convergence and Language Evolution research group.
My interests lie in language contact, typology, ideology and social cognition. More specifically, I have investigated contact typology and ideology in signed languages, and interrogated sociolinguistic typology in signed languages using lenses from Creole linguistics. These interests are motivated by a broader goal of understanding causal motivations behind the use and change of linguistic systems, with an emphasis on describing and clarifying the role of language ideology in the use of spoken language linguistic resources in signed languages.
In my dissertation research, I describe language ideologies about spoken language contact (mouthing) in American Sign Language (ASL), and investigate its relationship to the language usage and identities of perceivers. This work is motivated by a broader goal of understanding how ideology influences visual perception in ASL.
An undercurrent in my work is moving against exceptionalisation in linguistics. A practical implementation of this is my collaborative work within the University of Michigan's Linguistics department on incorporating minoritised languages in undergraduate linguistics classrooms, namely Creoles and signed languages.

What's new?

Here are some of my recent activities.

Linguistic Society of America Conference 2024

I presented at the LSA conference in New York year! I presented part of my dissertation work on attitudes to mouthing in ASL, specifically a Matched Guise-inspired task. I was also part of collaborative work led by Dr. Danielle Burgess and Dr. Marlyse Baptista (University of Pennsylvania) on pedagogical resources aimed at including Creoles in undergraduate linguistics classes. More details soon!

Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship 2023-2023

I was lucky enough to be awarded a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship that "supports outstanding doctoral candidates working on dissertations that are unusually creative, ambitious and impactful"

Directions in Language Evolution (DILE) workshop

I was invited to the Directions in Language Evolution (DILE) workshop hosted by the Center for Language Evolution Studies in beautiful Toruń, Poland where I presented collaborative work on morphological complexity with the SignMorph group.

ALT14 conference

I will be participating in the Linguistic Typology and Diversity: Theory, methods, and ethics in sign language typology workshop convened by Dr. Erin Wilkinson & Dr. Lynn Hou at the 14th Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology that will take place from December 15th-17th 2022 in Austin, Texas. I am part of a group presenting "Deconstructing notions of morphological ‘complexity': lessons from signed and spoken languages" authored by Felicia Bisnath, Marah Jaraisy,Hannah Lutzenberger, Rehana Omardeen & ,Adam Schembri

LDLT6 conference

I gave a talk at the Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory conference that will take place from December 16th-18th 2021. My talk is titled "Language ideology and language documentation in sign language typology" [video] [slides] [abstract].

LingCologne conference

I have a poster at LingCologne2021 that took place from June 10th-11th 2021. Poster here.

HDLS 14 conference

I presented a poster on mouthings across signed languages at the High Desert Linguistics Society 14 conference. Find my poster here.

I was also co-author of another talk on "in" and "on" in Swedish at HDLS 14 with Calle Börstell

Research

"Mouthings in 37 signed languages: typology, ecology and ideology" To appear in the Journal of Language Contact 16.1 [preprint]

Sign languages, like creoles, have been minoritised in linguistics. This makes perspectives on creoles the potential to illuminate the study of sign languages. A common way that sign languages are divided is into deaf and rural groups, based on social criteria. This distinction makes relationships between social and linguistic properties relevant. This paper investigates one such causal relationship, specifically whether extent of contact with spoken language(s) via institutionalised education translates into higher prevalence of the silent articulation of spoken words, mouthing. Across 37 sign languages (26 deaf; 11 rural) mouthing is prevalent regardless of language type, having been reported in 35 languages (25 deaf; 10 rural). This suggests that differences in language emergence do not produce a structural difference in terms of mouthing. Language documentation should include description of contact phenomena and ideologies, and comparison can avoid stereotyping of language groups based on tokenised cases (de facto prototypes).

Papers

  • Ariana Bancu, Joy Peltier, Felicia Bisnath, Danielle Burgess, Sophie Eakins, Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales, Moira Saltzman, Yourdanis Sedarous, Alicia Stevers & Marlyse Baptista. In preparation. "On 'revitalizing' attitudes towards Creole languages". To be submitted to Decolonizing Linguistics, A. Charity-Hudley, C. Mallinson and Mary Bucholtz (eds.), Oxford University Press.
  • Felicia Bisnath. Under review. Mouthings in 37 Signed Languages: typology, ecology and ideology. [preprint]
  • Felicia Bisnath. 2021. "Wh-questions in the Trinidad and Tobago Signing Community". Proceedings of the Fifty-sixth Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society. [pdf]
  • Felicia Bisnath & Silvia De Grandis. 2018. A Diachronic Study of Transparency in Sranan. Linguistics in Amsterdam 11(2). 179-210. [pdf]

Presentations & Posters

Teaching

Courses taught

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

University of the West Indies, St. Augustine

  • Sept-Dec 2019: Structure and Usage of Caribbean Sign Language II (Lecturer)

Mentoring

Get in touch

Feel free to contact me about my research!