Research

Zulu

Much of my research relies on my original fieldwork on the Bantu language Zulu.  I have made regular fieldwork trips to KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, spending time living in Umlazi Township, outside Durban, South Africa, as a visiting scholar at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Howard College Campus. In addition, I have worked with Zulu speakers in the US, via phone and email, and as a host to a Zulu-speaking visiting scholar at the University of Minnesota.  Conducting fieldwork on Zulu is important to my research program in multiple respects. There are many aspects of Zulu grammar that have not been documented; to fully explore the syntactic phenomena I am concerned with, I need access to original data.  In addition, as with many Bantu languages, much of the research on Zulu has involved very small numbers of speakers from different regions.  As a result, it can be difficult to interpret variations in the data across the literature.  My work in Durban has given me the opportunity to work with many speakers of a single dialect and to begin to understand the character of that dialect.  I hope to be able to continue mapping out the syntactic properties of the Durban dialect, and perhaps to begin to compare it to other dialects, such as the more conservative northern dialect spoken in the region of Maqongqo, where I have researched previously.  In addition, much recent research on Zulu has revealed striking differences with the syntactic properties attributed to the language by researchers working 50-100 years ago.  Even in my own research, generational differences in the Durban dialect have emerged.  Given these apparent syntactic shifts that are underway in Zulu, I am particularly eager to thoroughly document the current syntactic state of the language.

Ojibwe Language Revitalization

I am currently the PI on an NSF/NEH Dynamic Language Infrastructure project entitled "Developing Indigenous Scholars, Curriculum, and Language Documentation," with co-PIs Nora Livesay and Brendan Kishketon in the Department of American Indian Studies, and Linguistics PhD students Dustin Morrow and Zoe Brown. Through the project, we are recording 180 hours of new interviews with First Speakers of Ojibwe, annotating new and existing resources for inclusion in the Ojibwe People's Dictionary  and an annotated corpus, and developing curricular resources in Linguistics and Ojibwe language.  We are also conducting grammatical analysis on topics including evidentiality and wh-syntax. I am also the PI on PhD student Mskwaankwad Rice's NSF-DDRI project, "Investigating Temporal Morphology and Verbal Order in an Endangered Language," which investigates a number of syntactic and semantic phenomena involving clause type; expression of tense, aspect, and modality; the syntax of clausal embeddings; and counterfactuality.

A-dependencies

Much of my research has focused on the factors that govern nominal distribution, movement, and agreement patterns, using Zulu as a starting point.  My dissertation and 2015 book investigates nominal distribution in Zulu to argue that Zulu has both a system of abstract structural case and a system of morphological case, although it does not show the typical effects of nominative-type case licensing.  This conclusion is notable in light of some of Zulu's unusual-looking properties in the domain of nominal distribution and with respect to the long-standing assumption that Bantu languages lack both of these types of case.  My work in this area identifies a functional head in the vP domain that appears to be involved in nominal licensing, which I have suggested is also involved in the so-called conjoint/disjoint alternation in Zulu. In my recent work, I have explored connections between this functional head and other predication strategies in the language.  My recent and current research suggests that in addition to the licensing mentioned above, Zulu may have other structural licensing requirements, including passives, uncontrolled infinitives, and possession. In all of these cases, it appears that something like a Pred or Linker head may be implicated in licensing.

Another main strand of my research has focused on cross-linguistic patterns in raising construction. In a 2019 NLLT paper and related work, I propose that the raising profile of a language is predictable from independently observed properties about embedded clauses and EPP effects of the language. In this work, I argue that what is typically characterized as phase effects limiting raising is simply the result of variation in features that are associated with specific clause heads.

Embedded Clauses

My research on agreement and raising implicates the syntactic status of embedded clauses. In particular, the featural makeup and categorial status of different types of embedded clause has profound effects on how these clauses can be embedded and what types of long-distance dependencies can take place across them.  In Zulu and other Bantu languages, we observe a great deal of morphological complexity in complementizer heads themselves.  I am currently investigating links between the morphological makeup of these complementizers and their syntactic properties and am extending this research to similar constructions in Somali.

Counterfactual Typology

In ongoing projects, I have been working with Hadil Karawani and Bronwyn Bjorkman on the cross-linguistic typology of CF marking.  In a paper with Hadil Karawani, we compare Zulu and Palestinian Arabic to show that imperfective morphology does not seem to be a necessary ingredient of counterfactual marking in those languages that use past tense as a marker of CFs, contrary to previous generalizations that claimed imperfective aspect appears in addition to the past tense in a subset of languages that use past to mark CFs. In my work with Bronwyn Bjorkman, we propose further amendments to the typology, arguing that all languages that use "fake" temporal morphology to mark CFs require only a single ingredient: either past (English, French, Arabic, Zulu, Russian) or imperfective (Hindi, Persian).  In all languages that appear to require both past and imperfective, we demonstrate that the appearance of the second temporal ingredient is an illusion, resulting from morphological underspecificaton in a language's temporal system.

Syntax-Prosody

My work on Zulu has also involved the prosody-syntax interface, in particular focusing on the prosody of Zulu post-verbal subject constructions.  In these low subject constructions, the subject can easily receive a narrow focus interpretation.  As Cheng & Downing (2011) have showed, XPs that receive focus within vP typically require all other XPs to evacuate.  They argue that this movement occurs to ensure that  prosodic prominence falls on the focus.  In low subject constructions, movement of other XPs is syntactically ruled out.  In these cases, the grammar allows prosodic prominence to be realized on the focused subject even though there is usually a strict match between prosodic prominence and syntactic structure.  I am working on how to model the way in which the requirement for movement over prosodic manipulation is overridden by independent syntactic considerations.   I am also interested in the cross-linguistic typology of languages that favor movement to achieve prosody-focus match but where the movement strategy also runs into syntactic limitations.