Phonetics, Phonology, & Historical Linguistics
In very general terms, I am interested in using phonetic data to answer phonological questions. Broadly, these questions involve the nature of phonological primitives (features, gestures, segments), the timing of laryngealization and secondary articulation, prosodic phonological structure, and diachronic change within segmental inventories.
Secondary articulations, laryngeals, & prosodic structure
My MA research focused on labialization in Tigrinya (Ethio-Semitic, Ethiopia & Eritrea), and I subsequently undertook a collaborative project on long-distance palatalization in Harari (Ethio-Semitic, Ethiopia). I am interested in the articulatory and acoustic realization of secondary articulations, their diachronic origins, and their mobility and phonological connectivity to the "primary" segment. These patterns sometimes challenge our understanding of segments, features, and prosodic structure, making them an insightful domain for phonological research. In many ways, laryngealization can also behave like a secondary articulation, and this parallel led into my dissertation work on aspiration and preaspiration.
My first Generals Paper examined the relation between voiceless fricatives and the feature [spread glottis] cross-linguistically, specifically with respect to aspirated fricatives, which are unusually rare. This project examined claims in the literature that voiceless fricatives are inherently [+sg], drawing on cross-linguistic evidence to provide a typology of the phonological relationship between fricatives and aspiration. It also touched briefly on the role of [spread glottis] in tonogenesis, and historical development of systems with aspiration, tone, and/or voice quality distinctions. The manuscript that came about as a result of this research is available from the CV page.
My doctoral dissertation began as an extension of this work, and grew into a typological, phonological, and phonetic investigation of preaspiration. The representation of laryngeal features is often streamlined into an elegant and symmetrical system in theoretical phonology, overlooking some well-reported fundamental laryngeal asymmetries. The primary argument of the thesis is that preaspiration is not the phonological mirror image of postaspiration, and always involves an association to prosodic structure and moraic weight. The dissertation presents a typological look at preaspiration patterns, making use of both phonetic data and phonological processes across a diverse range of language families to illustrate this connection. My dissertation is also available from the CV page.
Writing Systems
Despite the insistent separation of sounds and spelling in introductory courses, there is much that we can learn about phonological structure by making use of orthography. I'm interested in orthographic influences on phonological awareness, particularly in speakers of languages that use very deep orthographies, non-alphabetic writing systems, or multiple writing systems with different grain sizes (e.g., that can be written in either an alphabet or an abugida or syllabary). I'm also interested in the structure of writing itself, particularly the underlying "features" of writing systems and diachronic change in scripts. (These are complemented by strong intersecting interests in typography, typesetting, and computer input systems.)
Syntax & Semantics
Aspect in Finnish & Estonian
The partitive case in Finnish has attracted a lot of attention in the area of aspectual research, as it signals not only nominal quantity but also atelicity and imperfectivity independently of verbal inflection, and is associated with clause polarity. However, most theoretical analyses of Finnish case marking do not consider the full range of uses of the partitive case, and thus fail to unify all of the case alternations seen in the language in an intuitive and elegant way. In addition to this, the facts of Estonian case marking are very similar but distinct, and analyses of aspect and case marking in this language are far outnumbered by those for Finnish. My second Generals paper undertook a syntactic investigation of aspect and case marking in these two languages, seeking to present all instances of partitive case marking in a unified way. The most current incarnation of this project is available as a 2017 proceedings paper from the CLA annual meeting, on the CV page.