Dr. Gessner's research focus is on Dene (Athabascan) languages, especially Dakelh (also known as Carrier), an endangered language spoken in central interior British Columbia. Her dissertation examines the phonology and phonetics of the stress and tone system of Dakelh, and more recent work concentrates on issues in Dakelh morphosyntax including relative clauses, causatives, direct & indirect discourse complements, and WH-questions. As an integral part of her research, Dr. Gessner is concerned with issues of language revitalization, curriculum development and second language acquisition of First Nations languages. She has an ongoing online dictionary project of the Lheidli dialect of Dakelh, with collaborators Bill Poser (UBC) and Chris Coey (UVic Linguistics).
Other areas of interest include the historical development of Dakelh, other Dene languages (especially Navajo and Dene Suline), languages of BC and North America more generally (typology, areal features) and Icelandic morphology and syntax.
Publications (excluding edited volumes)
2005 Properties of tone in Dene S˛uLiné. In Keren Rice & Sharon Hargus (eds.) Athabaskan Prosody. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 229-247.
2004 [with Gunnar Ólafur Hansson]. Anti-homophony effects in Dakelh (Carrier) valence morphology. In Proceedings of the Thirtieth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society, 93-104.
2004 Internal word domains in Dakelh: Evidence from the phonology-morphology interface. In Christine Ravinski & Yunhee Chung (eds.) Proceedings of WSCLA 9 (UBCWPL 15). Vancouver: UBCWPL, 27-40.
2002 Comparative markedness and tone sandhi in Dakelh (Carrier). In Mary Andronis, Erin Debenport, Anne Pycha & Keiko Yoshimura CLS 38: The Main Session. Papers from the Thirty-eighth Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, 223-236.
2002 Prosody in Dakelh: A comparison of two dialects. In Gary Holton (ed.) Proceedings of the 2002 Athabaskan Languages Conference. Alaska Native Language Center Working Papers, Number 2. Fairbanks: ANLC, 121-135.
2001 Object marking and agentivity in Navajo causatives. In Proceedings of the Twenty-seventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society, 81-94.
Presentations (last 5 years)
2006 Variation in Dakelh Complex Sentences: Causatives and Relatives. Paper presented at the Department of Linguistics Colloquium Series, University of Victoria, April 3, 2006.
2006 Variation in Athapaskan relative clause structures: findings from Dakelh. Paper presented at the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of America, Albuquerque, NM, January 5-8, 2006.
2005 Pitch Effects in Dakelh: Domains and Variations. Guest speaker paper presented at the Tenth Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas (WSCLA), University of Toronto, March 4-6, 2005.
2004 Deletion, fusion and epenthesis in Dakelh prefix morphology. Paper presented at the Department of Linguistics Colloquium Series, University of Victoria, March 26, 2004.
2004 Relative clause structure in Dakelh (Athapaskan). Paper presented at Syntax of the World’s Languages (SWL1), Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, August 5-8, 2004.
2004 The D-Effect in Dakelh: Fusion, deletion and epenthesis. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association, Winnipeg, MB, May 29-31, 2004.
2004 [with Gunnar Ólafur Hansson]. Anti-homophony effects in Dakelh (Carrier) valence morphology. Paper presented at the Thirtieth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society, University of California at Berkeley, February 13-16, 2004.
2004 Internal word domains in Dakelh: Evidence from the phonology-morphology interface. Paper presented at the Ninth Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, February 6-8, 2004.
2004 The morphology-phonology interface: Implications from Dakelh. Paper presented at the Department of Linguistics Colloquium Series, Simon Fraser University, January 29, 2004.
2002 Prosody in Dakelh: A comparison of two dialects. Paper presented at the Athabascan Languages Conference, Fairbanks, AK, June 16-18, 2002.
2002 Comparative markedness and tone sandhi in Dakelh (Carrier). Paper presented at the Thirty-eighth Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, University of Chicago, April 25-27, 2002.
2002 Variation in Dakelh causative formation. Paper presented at the Seventh Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, March 22-24, 2002.