Selected Research 

This project uses music as a historical text to look at the change in complementizer choice rates over time. In Kréyol Matnik it is often said that there is no overt verbal complementizer, only a null complementizer. An overt complementizer ke is also seen in the literature but is said to only exist in a "frenchicized" version of Kréyol Matnik. This research examines the complementizer choices that musical artists make over the career/lifespan.

The goal of this research is to investigate the plausibility of ke being a recent emergence in Kréyol Matnik due to higher and permanent sustained contact with French. Additionally, this research will examine the way that Kréyol Matnik is performed in music and how this relates to how it is performed in conversational situations.

I am working on this research under the supervison of Dr. Greg Guy, Dr. Renée Blake, Dr. Laurel Mackenzie and Dr. Gary Thoms.

Black English has been said allow for know in the progressive (knowing) when preceded by a preverbal tense-aspect-mood (TAM) marker such as stressed BIN (eg. I BIN knowin John), invariant be (eg. she be knowin the answers), unstressed bin (eg. I bin knowin John since I was little), among others. Among my friends across the United States we use knowing without a preverbal TAM marker which is written about as explicitly ungrammatical in both earlier literature on AAVE and literature on American English generally (eg. I'm knowin AAVE be changin). Being that it is used relatively infrequently, I had to figure out a way to show that it existed. I decided to look at Twitter. 

The goal of this paper was to examine the change of frequency on Twitter of non-preverbal-marked (-PVM) knowing in comparison to several commonly used preverbal-marked (+PVM) knowing phrases. This study samples from first person instances of -PVM knowing, BIN knowing, bin knowing and be knowing. The results show a substantial increase in usage of -PVM knowing in comparison to other +PVM  knowing constructions.

This was my last paper in undergrad at UMich working under Dr. Natasha Abner and Dr. Jessi Grieser which I finished in my first year of grad school at NYU under the supervision of Dr. Renée Blake.

Download link: https://repository.upenn.edu/bitstreams/a9f30d14-a29d-481f-ae59-5031bcafc728/download

Worked with Eden Février (Université d'État d'Haïti) and Célia Ventura (Université des Antilles) designing experiments to elicit comparative constructions in Kréyol Gwadloup. We ran experiments that we designed for elementary age children as well as for adults. The goal was to observe which comparative forms Guadeloupean speakers produced in Kréyol Gwadloup.

We found that adults possess a greater variety of comparison constructions with children preferring to give enumerations or descriptions that comparatives. While the children were able to express comparisons of equality, the only comparative of superiority/inferiority that we found being used is plis. 

In the full experiment we found constructions of superiority (pli, plis, plis ki, on mèyè, myé), inferiority (pani, mwens), and equality (kon, menm, menm biten, menm jan, osi). Interestingly we did not find the traditional Kréyol Gwadloup superiority comparative pasé in our data. 

This project was advised by Dr. Mirna Bolus from the Université des Antilles.