I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Indigenous Studies at the University of Lethbridge.

I can be contacted at: conor [.] snoek [at] uleth [dot] ca

Alternative email: snoek [at] ulberta [.] ca

My research interests include lexical semantics, historical linguistics, language description, and language revitalization, especially with regard to the Indigenous languages of the Americas.

The Windspeaker reported on a conference I organized in Fall 2019: Language conference to wake the spirit of the ancestors.

RESEARCH

History of Dene Languages
The Dene (Athapaskan) languages form a geographically discontinuous language family spread over large tracts of western North America. The facts of language history here contribute an important piece to the Oral Histories of Dene Peoples. I am an editor and contributor on the Pan-Dene Comparative Lexicon.

My article “From ‘clubs’ to ‘clocks’: lexical semantic extensions in Dene languages” has been published in Cognitive Linguistics. (Open access: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/cog-2021-0035/html)

Presentation on the Pan-Dene Comparative Lexicon at the Canadian Archaeological Association Conference 2021.

Cerro Xinolatépetl Totonac
Cerro Xinolatépetl Totonac is a polysynthetic agglutinating language spoken in at least three communities in Puebla State, Mexico. Since 2015, I have been building a corpus of materials with the aim of providing a grammatical and lexicographic description of CX Totonac, as well as situating the language in its historical and dialectological context.

Semantics
Metonymy has become recognized as an important meaning construction strategy allowing for rich semantic contents to be evoked with minimal linguistic resources. The study of metonymy within cognitive linguistics has led to the recognition that this meaning-building strategy is a central component of linguistic reasoning and a key factor in the evolution of the lexicon. Below is a talk on metonymy in the lexicon of Dene languages.

TEACHING

Spring 2023

INDG\LING 1100 Language and Culture in Indigenous America

INDG\LING 3850 Second-Language Teaching & Learning

Fall 2023

INDG 2455 Social Organization: Kinship

INDG\LING 3850 Language, Culture, Cognition