Research topics
My main research areas are the Naish subgroup of Sino-Tibetan (Naxi, Na and Laze), and the Vietic subgroup of Austroasiatic.
My main field of expertise is experimental phonetics/phonology, with a focus on prosody, and on tone in particular. I also have a strong interest in historical linguistics, and a commitment to linguistic documentation: contributing to building reliable, high-quality databases of endangered languages. In the words of Andrew Garrett (University of California at Berkeley): “The evanescence of analytic work means, for many linguists involved in language documentation, that their most important academic creations will be their archived notes, recordings, and supporting materials”.
Ongoing research projects
• Languages of the Tibeto-Burman area (a research strand at LACITO)
• “LabField: Bringing the lab into the field” (a work package belonging to the “Phonetics & phonology” strand of the “Empirical Foundations of Linguistics” Labex)
• “Computational Language Documentation by 2025” (CLD 2025) (a German-French project funded by ANR, coordinated by Gilles Adda, CNRS-LISN)
Keywords
phonetics – phonology – typology – panchronic phonology – experimental phonetics – language documentation – morpho-phonology – oral tradition – Sino-Tibetan – Austroasiatic – Laze – Na – Naxi – Vietnamese
Corpora deposited in the Pangloss Collection
Yongning Na – Naxi – Laze
Table of contents
Selected publications
— Fily, M., Wisniewski, G., Guillaume, S., Adda, G., & Michaud, A. (2024). Establishing degrees of closeness between audio recordings along different dimensions using large-scale cross-lingual models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.05581.
— 2018. Michaud, Alexis, Oliver Adams, Trevor Cohn, Graham Neubig & Séverine Guillaume. “Integrating automatic transcription into the language documentation workflow: experiments with Na data and the Persephone toolkit“. Language Documentation and Conservation 12. 393–429.
— 2018. Adams, Oliver, Trevor Cohn, Graham Neubig, Hilaria Cruz, Steven Bird & Alexis Michaud. 2018. “Evaluating phonemic transcription of low-resource tonal languages for language documentation“. Proceedings of LREC 2018 (Language Resources and Evaluation Conference), 3356–3365. Miyazaki.
— 2017, Tone in Yongning Na: lexical tones and morphotonology. Berlin: Language Science Press (Studies in Diversity Linguistics 13), 2017.- 573 p.
— 2015. Michaud, Alexis, Michel Ferlus & Minh-Châu Nguyễn. Strata of standardization: the Phong Nha dialect of Vietnamese (Quảng Bình Province) in historical perspective. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 38(1). 124–162.
— 2015. Michaud, Alexis & Jacqueline Vaissière. Tone and intonation: introductory notes and practical recommendations. KALIPHO – Kieler Arbeiten zur Linguistik und Phonetik 3. 43–80.
— 2015. Niebuhr, Oliver & Alexis Michaud. 2015. Speech data acquisition: the underestimated challenge. KALIPHO – Kieler Arbeiten zur Linguistik und Phonetik 3. 1–42.
— 2011, Jacques Guillaume, Michaud Alexis, Approaching the historical phonology of three highly eroded Sino-Tibetan languages: Naxi, Na and Laze, Diachronica 28(4) : 468-498.
Publications available in HAL
Access to the full set of publications in the preprint archive HAL
— 2024, “Cathedral, bazaar, data garden: the Pangloss Collection”, presented at the Language Documentation and Archiving Conference, Berlin & Online, 4-6 Sept, 2024. https://youtu.be/9Vgb4hPpPj8?si=1kPHnvJNuNkzSgm4&t=10 (21 minutes)
— 2024, “From archival activism to constant reflexivity: Ethical considerations in field linguistics in the era of Natural Language Processing”, keynote presentation at ATALA’s Journée Éthique et TAL (organized by Karën Fort), LORIA, Nancy, April 2nd, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U4mG-BRczE&t=60s (45 minutes).
— 2021: FORGE 2021 Panel discussion: “Mapping the Landscape – Research Data Management in the Humanities“.
— 2019: “Persephone: The benefits of interdisciplinary dialogue between computer scientists and fieldworkers“, at the workshop “Persephone: a tool for the automatic phonemic transcription of endangered languages”, SOAS World Languages Institute, Londres, November 2019. 38 minutes.
In Chinese / 中文
— 2020, 倾听 – 法国语言学家米可永宁摩梭语采风记录 (“Listening to the Na of Yongning”)
— 2012, “Sound Hunter” / 路•音” A documentary film about fieldwork among the Naxi, 2012. Tianjin Television 天津电视台. 24 minutes.
In French
— 2020, « À l’écoute des Na de Yongning »: documentary film about fieldwork on Yongning Na. https://www.canal-u.tv/chaines/cnrs-service-audiovisuel-d-ardis-uar2259/a-l-ecoute-des-na-de-yongning
— 2020, « Comment trouver le bon ton », film avec Pascal Boyeldieu, 13:00 mn, réalisation Franck Guillemain & Céline Ferlita (UPS2259, série “Langues vivantes / Langues vitales”). https://www.canal-u.tv/video/cnrs_ups2259/comment_trouver_le_bon_ton.56711
— 2019, “Faut-il sauver les langues en danger ?” (François Yvon et Alexis Michaud), Universcience – Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, December 2019. 26 minutes.
— 2019, “Vidéo sur le terrain : un projet conjoint de documentation linguistique et de film documentaire” (Franck Guillemain et Alexis Michaud), séminaire LACITO “Terrains, analyse et comparaison des langues”, March 2019. 84 minutes.
— 2014, “L’analyse des systèmes de tons“, intervention à l’Ecole d’été LACITO “Méthodes en linguistique, des données empiriques aux hypothèses typologiques”, July 2014. 104 minutes.