Patricia Alice Shaw

Patricia Alice Shaw is a Canadian linguist specializing in phonology and known for her work on First Nations languages.

Education and career

Patricia Shaw was born in Montreal and moved at the age of 12 to Winnipeg. She received her B.A. in English from St. John's College of the University of Manitoba in 1967, her M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Toronto in 1973, and her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Toronto in 1976 with a dissertation on Theoretical Issues in Dakota Phonology and Morphology.
She taught at York University from 1976 until 1979 when she took up a position at the University of British Columbia. Since 30 June 2020 she is Professor emerita of Anthropological Linguistics in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. She was Founding Chair of the university's First Nations and Endangered Languages Program.
A major focus of her work has been hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, the Musqueam dialect of Halkomelem, on which she has both done research and helped to create the joint Musqueam Indian Band-UBC First Nations Languages Program partnership.

Honors and distinctions

President of the Society for the Study of the Languages of the Americas from 2011-2013;
Endangered Languages Steering Committee of the Canadian Linguistic Association,
Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation ; and has co-chaired several SSHRC Aboriginal Strategic Research Grant adjudication committees.
Editor of the First Nations Languages Series at UBC Press;
Taught at InField 2008, InField 2010, CoLang 2012, CoLang 2014
Faculty Mentor at the Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages in 2011, 2013, as well as the Breath of Life California Indian Language Restoration Workshop in 2012, 2014.
Board of Directors, Endangered Languages Fund

Selected publications

Patricia A. Shaw. 1980. Theoretical Issues in Dakota Phonology and Morphology. Routledge.
Kaisse, E., & Shaw, P. 1985. On the theory of Lexical Phonology. Phonology Yearbook, ''2, 1-30.
Patricia A. Shaw.1991. CONSONANT HARMONY SYSTEMS: THE SPECIAL STATUS OF CORONAL HARMONY. In: Carole Paradis, Jean-François Prunet, The Special Status of Coronals: Internal and External Evidence. Academic Press, Pages 125-157.,
Patricia A. Shaw. 1993. Templatic evidence for the syllable nucleus. NELS 23, article 14.
Shaw, Patricia A.. 2011. Non-adjacency in Reduplication. Studies on Reduplication, edited by Bernhard Hurch. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 161–210.
Gordon, Matthew, Ghushchyan, Edita, McDonnell, Bradley, Rosenblum, Daisy and Shaw, Patricia A.. 2012. Sonority and central vowels: A cross-linguistic phonetic study. The Sonority Controversy'', edited by Steve Parker. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 219–256.