A grammar of Sherbro

G. Tucker Childs (1948-2021) was professor emeritus at Portland State University where he taught for over 25 years. He previously held positions at University of Toronto, University of Witwatersrand, Temple University, and San Jose State University. He holds degrees from Stanford University (A.B.), Trinity College (Dipl.), University of Virginia (M.Ed.), Georgetown University (M.S.), and University of California, Berkeley (M.A., Ph.D.). Childs dedicated his career to the documentation and preservation of endangered West African languages and their cultures. During his 40-year career, he produced grammars, dictionaries, readers, and primers, as well as numerous academic articles, on the languages of the Bolom-Kisi group, which includes Kisi (1995, 2000), Mani (2007, 2009), Bom-Kim (2009, 2020), and Sherbro (the current volume), which was completed in 2020 just before his death. He was awarded the Linguistic Society of America’s Kenneth L. Hale Award, which recognizes scholars who have done outstanding work on the documentation of a language or family of languages that is endangered or no longer spoken. In his fieldwork, Childs went beyond standard elicitation information, placing greater emphasis on naturally occurring conversational data and on more nuanced descriptions of socio-cultural settings and the impact of language policy and planning.