Janis Nuckolls is an

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anthropological

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and professor of linguistics and

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Brigham Young University Brigham Young University (BYU, sometimes referred to colloquially as The Y) is a private research university in Provo, Utah. It was founded in 1875 by religious leader Brigham Young and is sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day ...

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. She has spent many years doing field research, with a primary focus on the Amazonian Quichua (Kichwa) people in Ecuador and their endangered language. Nuckolls earned her BA from the

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and her AM and

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from the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

. After first visiting the Amazon in graduate school, Nuckolls has been returning for field research for more than thirty years.

Research

Quechua, considered an endangered language, is spoken by between 10,000 and 40,000 people. Nuckolls has published extensively on the sound-symbolic grammar, performance, and cognition in

Pastaza Quechua The Canelos-Quichua, also known as the Quichua of Pastaza, is an Indigenous people of Ecuador. They are a Lowland Quichua (Runa Shimi) people, inhabiting the province of Pastaza on the banks of the Curaray, Bonbonaza, and Pastaza rivers, in Per ...

. Her interest includes studying the functions of ideophones, which are words that offer a vivid sensory impression through sound, movement, shape, or action. Nuckolls described it "as painting a word picture–even though they are words, they function as images which communicate not only with sounds but with gestures as well". She has published, among other places, in the ''

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Annual Review of Anthropology The ''Annual Review of Anthropology'' is an academic journal that publishes review articles of significant developments in anthropology and its subfields. First published by Stanford University Press in 1959 under the name the ''Biennial Review of ...

'', ''Latin American Indian Literatures'', the ''Journal of Latin American Lore'', ''Anthropological Linguistics'', ''

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''. Believing ideophones to be best recorded in video format, to capture their performative multi-modal nature, she set up the Quechua Real Words 'audio-visual dictionary' of Amazonian Quichua (formerly also written as Quechua, but now written as Quichua and Kichwa in Ecuador) ideophones, largely from Pastaza Quichua: https://quechuarealwords.byu.edu/ As Professor Nuckolls herself put it on the website: "Quechua Real Words is a site dedicated to an appreciation and study of real words that, by their nature, are difficult to define within a traditional dictionary format. Such words, called ‘ideophones,’ ‘mimetics,' ‘expressives,’ and ‘onomatopoeias’ by linguists, present many problems for analysis because of their melodic and gestural dimensions. They are not designed to be abstracted onto a two-dimensional page and are therefore presented here with audiovisual clips of their use."

Personal life

She has one son and two daughters. She is a member of

the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, informally known as the LDS Church or Mormon Church, is a Nontrinitarianism, nontrinitarian Christianity, Christian church that considers itself to be the Restorationism, restoration of the ...

Bibliography

*''Sounds Like Life: Sound-Symbolic Grammar, Performance, and Cognition in Pastaza Quechua'' (Oxford University Press, 1996) *''Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman: Ideophony, Dialogue, and Perspective'' (University of Arizona Press, 2010, )

References

External links

BYU Linguistics & English Language
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nuckolls, Janis University of Chicago alumni University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni Living people Linguists from the United States Sociolinguists Brigham Young University faculty American women linguists Communication scholars American Latter Day Saints Year of birth missing (living people)