Elango Kumaran
ekumaran@usc.edu
I'm a 5th year PhD student in Linguistics at USC. I work on morphosyntactic and phonological theory, looking at data from a variety of languages from around the world.
In morphosyntax, most of my work is on phi-features (person, number, gender, honorificity) and the syntactic and morphological operations that manipulate them. I'm especially interested in intricate verb agreement systems; for instance:
portmanteau agreement and discontinuous agreement in Karuk (isolate, California)
the interplay of person, honorificity, information structure, and syntactic locality in Maithili (Indo-Aryan, Nepal/India) agreement [collaborative work with Samir Alam and Yogendra P. Yadava]
number mismatches and number conflation in Murrinhpatha (Southern Daly, Australia) agreement
complex omnivorous number agreement in Northern Iroquoian languages.
Recently, my interest in phi-features has also extended to the nominal domain:
the position of possessive clitics in Alshaa Mongolian and Khalkha Mongolian postpositional phrases [collaborative work with Jun Jie Lim and Samir Alam]
associative plurality in rural Iberian Spanish first names [collaborative work with Luis Miguel Toquero Pérez].
In phonology, my work focuses on the effect of syllable weight on the delineation of stress domains:
weight-sensitive prosodification of agreement prefixes in Karuk (isolate, California) [collaborative work with Darby Grachek]
modeling non-canonical weight-sensitive stress systems using adjustable prosodic word edges in Optimality Theory
modeling stress windows and 'positional weight' using gradient alignment and gradient weight in Harmonic Grammar.
CV (updated Sep 2023)
Proceedings papers
To appear. Murrinhpatha number conflation: The limits of feature markedness and *ABA. Proceedings of CLS 59. (slides)
To appear. Murrinhpatha number mismatch as partial Agree. Proceedings of CLS 58. (poster)
2023. Adjustable word edges and weight-sensitive stress. (Languages: Karuk, Punjabi.) Proceedings of AMP 2022. (slides)
2022. Focus and multiple agreement in Maithili. With Samir Alam. Proceedings of CLS 57.
2022. Constraint-driven Agree. (Languages: Maithili, Hinuq, Alutor, Sanzhi Dargwa, and more.) Proceedings of LSA 2022.
2022. Two types of external argument in Karuk. Proceedings of CLS 56.
2018. Karuk Agreement. Proceedings of WECOL 2017, 85-94.
Some other projects
2023. Karuk prefixal stress: Optimizing prosodic word edge placement. With Darby Grachek. MorrisHalle@100 poster.
2023. A note on consonant strengthening at both edges in Toda. One-page manuscript.
2023. Number agreement does not always favor plural. (Languages: Sahel Ketama Berber, Onondaga.) LSA 2023 slides.
2021. Multiple exponence is antilocal and secondary exponence is local: evidence from Karuk. MultEx@ZAS 2021 handout.
2021. Positional weight emerges from gradient weight and gradient alignment in HG. (Languages: Tamil, Hupa.) AMP 2021 poster. (5 minute video)
2020. The existence of three-syllable stress windows does not favor HG over OT. (Languages: Pirahã, Macedonian.) AMP 2020 poster. (5 minute video)