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Josh Holden

University of Alberta, Linguistics, Post-Doc

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Josh Holden has studied the Denesułiné language and worked with Dene communities on language initiatives for over 12 years, and Chinantecan languages in the last two years. He obtained his MSc in Linguistics from the University of Alberta in 2006 and his PhD from the University of Montreal in 2011 with a dissertation on Denesuliné lexical semantics, which was followed by a collection of interlinear Dene oral histories entitled Benasní–I Remember (2013). From 2011 to 2017 he was a lexicographer with Druide Informatique, Inc., where he helped create the English version of Antidote, comprehensive set of dictionaries and writing tools. Since 2017 he has been faculty at University nuhelotine thaiyots’įnistameyimâkanak Blue Quills, formerly Blue Quills First Nations College, a First Nations owned and operated university in St. Paul, Alberta, where he teaches linguistics to Cree and Dene students and assists with language revitalization projects. His research interests include language documentation from a descriptive perspective, theoretical and community based lexicography, morpho-semantic compositionality and grammatical relations.
Supervisors: Igor Mel'čuk

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University of Alberta

Ghazaleh Kazeminejad

Trond Trosterud

University of Tromsø

Clarissa Forbes

Sjur N Moshagen

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Trosterud Trond

UiT The Arctic University of Norway

Marie-Odile Junker

University of Tehran

Arvi Hurskainen

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Books by Josh Holden

Benasní – I Remember: Dene Sułiné Oral Histories With Morphological Analysis

10 monolingual interviews and two texts collected by the author from Dene Elders from Dillon abou... more 10 monolingual interviews and two texts collected by the author from Dene Elders from Dillon about cultural loss and survival in the 20th century. Mirrored Dene-English texts followed by interlinear translation distinguishing 'live' morphology from morphological idioms. Historical introduction and 90-page morphological sketch. 535 pages.

Conference Presentations by Josh Holden

Expressibility of Constant Participants in Denesųłiné Linguistic Situations

by Josh Holden and Gina McIntyre

Working Papers in Dene Languages 2019, 2020

El uso de la lengua indígena en la universidad indígena Blue Quills: retos, perspectivas y ideologías lingüísticas.

5th Annual Meeting of Intercultural Universities. Mayan Intercultural University of Quintana Roo. , 2018

Bringing Indigenous Frameworks to Teaching Morphosyntax: The Experience of a Cree Master’s Class.

Special symposium Natives4Linguistics II: Sharing Our Findings. Linguistic Society ofAmerica Annual Meeting. , 2019

Expressing Concepts of FEEL, CAN, CAN'T, and PART in Denesųłiné

Working Papers in Dene Languages 2017. Fairbanks, Alaska: Alaska Native Language Center, 2018

Aspect, Mood and Tense Inflection in Dene Sųłiné

Advances in Meaning-Text Theory 2007. Vienna: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 69, 2007

Verbs in the Athabaskan language Dene Sųłiné are obligatorily marked for aspect and mood, althoug... more Verbs in the Athabaskan language Dene Sųłiné are obligatorily marked for aspect and mood, although aspects and some moods are never expressed independently of each other. This distribution, as well as the modal connotations of the imperfective and perfective, is best explained by positing cumulative expression of aspect and mood grammemes with some combinatorial restrictions. Tense is not obligatory, but Dene Sųłiné has a quasi-inflectional tense category, whose values are expressed by postverbal particles, and which interacts differently with the respective aspect and mood categories. Tense particle sequences and verb-particle constructions further broaden the range of possible meanings in the Dene Sųłiné TAM system.

Towards a New Meta-Language for Athabaskan Linguistics: The Case of Morphological Phrasemes

Meaning-Text Theory 2009. Montreal: Observatoire de Linguistique Sens-Texte, 2009

This paper is concerned with the analysis and citation of morphological phrasemes in the Athabask... more This paper is concerned with the analysis and citation of morphological phrasemes in the Athabaskan language Dene Sųłiné. The concepts of derivation, morphoids, submorphs and morphological phraseme are reviewed, and a few principles are suggested for distinguishing morphological phrasemes from transparent derivation, followed by corollaries of how these principles can be applied to the presentation of interlinearized examples. This approach is contrasted with the current practice in Athabaskan and Americanist linguistics of not distinguishing between derivation and morphological phrasemes in the morphemic glosses.

Papers by Josh Holden

An Expanded Finite-State Transducer for Tsuut'ina Verbs

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), 2022

This paper describes the expansion of a finite state transducer (FST) for the transitive verb sys... more This paper describes the expansion of a finite state transducer (FST) for the transitive verb system of Tsuut'ina (ISO 639-3: srs), a Dene (Athabaskan) language spoken in Alberta, Canada. Dene languages have unique templatic morphology, in which lexical, inflectional and derivational tiers are interlaced. Drawing on data from close to 9,000 verbal wordforms, the expanded model can handle a great range of common and rare argument structure types, including ditransitive and uniquely Dene object experiencer verbs. While challenges of speed remain, this expansion shows the ability of FST modelling to handle morphology of this type, and the expanded FST shows great promise for community language applications such as a morphologically informed online dictionary and word predictor, and for further FST development.

Indigenous Universities and Language Reclamation: Lessons in Balancing Linguistics, L2 Teaching, and Language Frameworks from Blue Quills University

Language Documentation & Conservation special issue, Collaborative Approaches to the Challenge of Language Documentation and Conservation (Wilson de Lima Silva & Katherine Riestenberg, eds.), no. 20 (February 2020): 20–37., 2020

This article describes Dene and Cree language programs at University nuhelot'įne thaiyots'į nista... more This article describes Dene and Cree language programs at University nuhelot'įne thaiyots'į nistameyimâkanak Blue Quills, a First Nations-owned university in Canada created in a former residential school building in the decades following a 1969 sit-in by concerned parents. The history of UnBQ and its role in language and cultural revitalization are situated in the context of the North American tribal college and university movement, as is the author's integration of the challenge by Leonard (2017, 2018) to explore Indigenous frameworks for language in his teaching of introductory linguistics. Follow-up interviews with students, a department head and the UnBQ president include their ideas for a possible Cree-based framework for linguistic analysis. Translation and co-creation of linguistic terminology into Plains Cree and Denesųłiné support language use in the classroom and students' understanding. Practical challenges facing UnBQ are discussed.

Semantic primes in Denesųłiné: In search of some ‘universal’ meanings.

International Journal of American Linguistics 85 (1): 75–121., 2019

This study examines whether the semantic primes of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) are at... more This study examines whether the semantic primes of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) are attested in Denesųłiné (Athabaskan, Northern Canada). The NSM claims that the semantic primes are basic and universal meanings expressible as lexical units or morphemes in all languages. This study finds, however, that certain claimed semantic primes are problematic to posit in Dene, including BE (SOMEWHERE), BAD, MOMENT, FEEL, KIND, and PART. Dene seems not to express partonymy and typonymy via abstract lexical items. This article suggests improvements in the NSM in light of the Dene data and reflects on how semantic decomposition approaches like NSM can improve the documentation and analysis of this language.

Benasní – I Remember: Dene Sułiné Oral Histories With Morphological Analysis

10 monolingual interviews and two texts collected by the author from Dene Elders from Dillon abou... more 10 monolingual interviews and two texts collected by the author from Dene Elders from Dillon about cultural loss and survival in the 20th century. Mirrored Dene-English texts followed by interlinear translation distinguishing 'live' morphology from morphological idioms. Historical introduction and 90-page morphological sketch. 535 pages.

Expressibility of Constant Participants in Denesųłiné Linguistic Situations

by Josh Holden and Gina McIntyre

Working Papers in Dene Languages 2019, 2020

El uso de la lengua indígena en la universidad indígena Blue Quills: retos, perspectivas y ideologías lingüísticas.

5th Annual Meeting of Intercultural Universities. Mayan Intercultural University of Quintana Roo. , 2018

Bringing Indigenous Frameworks to Teaching Morphosyntax: The Experience of a Cree Master’s Class.

Special symposium Natives4Linguistics II: Sharing Our Findings. Linguistic Society ofAmerica Annual Meeting. , 2019

Expressing Concepts of FEEL, CAN, CAN'T, and PART in Denesųłiné

Working Papers in Dene Languages 2017. Fairbanks, Alaska: Alaska Native Language Center, 2018

Aspect, Mood and Tense Inflection in Dene Sųłiné

Advances in Meaning-Text Theory 2007. Vienna: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 69, 2007

Verbs in the Athabaskan language Dene Sųłiné are obligatorily marked for aspect and mood, althoug... more Verbs in the Athabaskan language Dene Sųłiné are obligatorily marked for aspect and mood, although aspects and some moods are never expressed independently of each other. This distribution, as well as the modal connotations of the imperfective and perfective, is best explained by positing cumulative expression of aspect and mood grammemes with some combinatorial restrictions. Tense is not obligatory, but Dene Sųłiné has a quasi-inflectional tense category, whose values are expressed by postverbal particles, and which interacts differently with the respective aspect and mood categories. Tense particle sequences and verb-particle constructions further broaden the range of possible meanings in the Dene Sųłiné TAM system.

Towards a New Meta-Language for Athabaskan Linguistics: The Case of Morphological Phrasemes

Meaning-Text Theory 2009. Montreal: Observatoire de Linguistique Sens-Texte, 2009

This paper is concerned with the analysis and citation of morphological phrasemes in the Athabask... more This paper is concerned with the analysis and citation of morphological phrasemes in the Athabaskan language Dene Sųłiné. The concepts of derivation, morphoids, submorphs and morphological phraseme are reviewed, and a few principles are suggested for distinguishing morphological phrasemes from transparent derivation, followed by corollaries of how these principles can be applied to the presentation of interlinearized examples. This approach is contrasted with the current practice in Athabaskan and Americanist linguistics of not distinguishing between derivation and morphological phrasemes in the morphemic glosses.

An Expanded Finite-State Transducer for Tsuut'ina Verbs

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), 2022

This paper describes the expansion of a finite state transducer (FST) for the transitive verb sys... more This paper describes the expansion of a finite state transducer (FST) for the transitive verb system of Tsuut'ina (ISO 639-3: srs), a Dene (Athabaskan) language spoken in Alberta, Canada. Dene languages have unique templatic morphology, in which lexical, inflectional and derivational tiers are interlaced. Drawing on data from close to 9,000 verbal wordforms, the expanded model can handle a great range of common and rare argument structure types, including ditransitive and uniquely Dene object experiencer verbs. While challenges of speed remain, this expansion shows the ability of FST modelling to handle morphology of this type, and the expanded FST shows great promise for community language applications such as a morphologically informed online dictionary and word predictor, and for further FST development.

Indigenous Universities and Language Reclamation: Lessons in Balancing Linguistics, L2 Teaching, and Language Frameworks from Blue Quills University

Language Documentation & Conservation special issue, Collaborative Approaches to the Challenge of Language Documentation and Conservation (Wilson de Lima Silva & Katherine Riestenberg, eds.), no. 20 (February 2020): 20–37., 2020

This article describes Dene and Cree language programs at University nuhelot'įne thaiyots'į nista... more This article describes Dene and Cree language programs at University nuhelot'įne thaiyots'į nistameyimâkanak Blue Quills, a First Nations-owned university in Canada created in a former residential school building in the decades following a 1969 sit-in by concerned parents. The history of UnBQ and its role in language and cultural revitalization are situated in the context of the North American tribal college and university movement, as is the author's integration of the challenge by Leonard (2017, 2018) to explore Indigenous frameworks for language in his teaching of introductory linguistics. Follow-up interviews with students, a department head and the UnBQ president include their ideas for a possible Cree-based framework for linguistic analysis. Translation and co-creation of linguistic terminology into Plains Cree and Denesųłiné support language use in the classroom and students' understanding. Practical challenges facing UnBQ are discussed.

Semantic primes in Denesųłiné: In search of some ‘universal’ meanings.

International Journal of American Linguistics 85 (1): 75–121., 2019

This study examines whether the semantic primes of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) are at... more This study examines whether the semantic primes of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) are attested in Denesųłiné (Athabaskan, Northern Canada). The NSM claims that the semantic primes are basic and universal meanings expressible as lexical units or morphemes in all languages. This study finds, however, that certain claimed semantic primes are problematic to posit in Dene, including BE (SOMEWHERE), BAD, MOMENT, FEEL, KIND, and PART. Dene seems not to express partonymy and typonymy via abstract lexical items. This article suggests improvements in the NSM in light of the Dene data and reflects on how semantic decomposition approaches like NSM can improve the documentation and analysis of this language.