Research

Current Projects

Malagasy Vowel Devoicing

In my PhD dissertation, I investigate the phonetics and phonology of Malagasy "devoiced" vowels. Looking at both acoustic and distributional evidence, I find that devoicing is best characterized as extreme coarticulation between vowels and their onsets. The dissertation includes a detailed acoustic analysis of devoicing, probabilistic modelling of the phonological distribution, and a theoretical account using Articulatory Phonology.

A key finding is that the likelihood of a vowel being "devoiced" is scaled to the sonority of the following consonant; the likelihood of devoicing is greater before stops > fricatives > nasals > laterals > /r/. I model this result as Sonority-Driven Gestural Timing: the relative timing between segments is determined by the difference in sonority between them, driving more overlap, and therefore more devoicing, between vowels and less sonorous consonants.

I recently delivered a keynote address at AFLA 30 on this work.

Syntax-Prosody Interactions

Malagasy exhibits a strong correspondence between syntactic and prosodic structure, lending support to frameworks like Match Theory. I'm interested in exploiting this correspondence to reveal facts about the syntax of Malagasy, under the premise that prosodic phrasing represents syntactic structure. My most recent work is on imperatives, calling into question existing syntactic analyses based on prosodic data.

Mirativity

Malagasy has a discourse particle re, which marks surprisal or sudden revelation. Alongside Colin Brown and Rija Rasolonandrasana, we analyze this particle as a mirative marker that can appear in declaratives, imperatives, and wh- questions. Syntactically, re's canonical position is following the predicate. We suggest that re is base-generated high in the clausal superstructure; the predicate-final position of re is derived by predicate raising to the left of re.

We recently presented this work at AFLA 31. 

Malagasy Intonation

My MA thesis proposed an Autosegmental-Metrical model of the intonation of the Merina dialect of Malagasy, an Austronesian language spoken in Madagascar. The thesis includes a phonetic and phonological description of Malagasy pitch accents and boundary tones and positions Malagasy within the typology of intonation.

I am expanding the model for a chapter in Prosodic Typology III, edited by Sun-Ah Jun and Sameer ud Dowla Khan.