Research

For my PhD I am looking at the phenomenon Bantu Spirantization (BS) from an amphichronic view point, and arguing in favor of a partially inheritance-based distribution for the phenomenon. In addition to breaking BS down into its component parts and critically analyzing the prevalent conception of the phenomenon, I am analyzing the  history, evolution, and origins of the phenomenon in three case studies. My three case studies are focused on BS in Luban, Chaga-Taita, and Great Lakes Bantu. My current premise is that Luban is an example of BS as a Tree and that Chaga-Taita is an example of BS as a Linkage. As for Great Lakes Bantu, I am still working which model or combination of models would best explain the BS found in its languages.

For my MA I analyzed mutations in glide clusters in Kinyarwanda. This involved three main components: the vowel hiatus resolution processes that created most of the glides; the fortition, epenthesis, and palatalization that are used as repairs for the apparent constraint against glide clusters; and the morphological BS operations used to repair glide clusters in certain morphemes. In addition to the phonological analysis involved, I also did fieldwork with a native speaker and some morpho-syntactic work on the identity of the BS-triggering morphemes.

My Bantuist interests are strongly focused on the Great Lakes Bantu languages, which are a group of languages around the African Great Lakes, and are located in Rwanda, Burundi, Eastern DRC, South Uganda, Northwestern Tanzania, and Western Kenya. I am especially interested in their morpho-phonology, historical phonology, and verbal morpho-syntax.

My phonological interests lie in two areas: the mechanics and theory behind Optimality Theory, and how synchronic phonology handles diachronic data. When it comes to OT, I am quite fond of the idea of everything happening in "one-fell swoop". I have become more open to Stratal OT, and multiple runs through the constraints, but still think there needs to be a strong restriction on the number of runs that can be made. I am sympathetic to the idea that after each syntactic phase, material is fed back into the phonology.

I also believe that we need some sort of minimalism applied to constraints; there have been too many exotic constraints and there seems to be no limit to what a constraint can be. A solution to this that I lean towards is a return to Local Conjunction,  as a mechanism to create more sophisticated constraints out of a set of simple base constraints.

As to the synchronic-diachronic interactions, I am quite interested in how synchronic phonologies explain/ignore phenomenon of diachronic origin. A key example of this is how very little of the Japanese Rendaku literature addresses the curious fact that /h/ voices to [b]. It is often explained away with footnotes on the history of *p in Japanese. However, if there is a productive allophony where /h/ becomes [b] when given the feature [+voice], that would imply that /h/ is phonologically [+labial] in Japanese. The other type of synchronic-diachronic interaction in phonology that interests me is when/why phonologists try to create synchronic grammars to explain processes that clearly lexicalized and are no longer productive. While some of the processes may still be transparent, the lack of productivity, to me, indicates that this is a diachronic operation, not a synchronic one.

My Historical interests are mainly in regards to taxonomy, reconstruction, how innovations get distributed, and the limits and possibilities of the theory of the Lifecycle of Phonological Processes. I am interested in, and am working on improving the taxonomy of the Bantu family, and aim to create reconstruction for the various daughter-families of Proto-Bantu. I hope to expand this endeavor to the broader Niger-Congo family as well. As part of my work on Bantu taxonomy I have become familiar with the confusing quagmire that is determining whether a shared innovation is evidence of contact, common heritage, or parallel evolution. This has led me to be interested in the mechanics of how these three work, and in how we can diagnose which of the three a shared innovation is.

I like and employ the theory of the Lifecycle of Phonological Processes as a tool to explain sound change. I appreciate its amphichronic approach to language across time, and think its premise of sound change starting in phonetics before becoming phonological are accurate. I favor as well its idea that phonological processes become increasingly more deeply ingrained in the phonology before finally becoming morphologized and lexicalized. I disagree with its premise that there are only three phonological levels (phrase, word, and stem), and believe there needs to be more research on how processes can and cannot move along the lifecycle. 

I am fascinated in the deeply complex phonological alterations that morphologies often produce. I think they can tell us a lot of very important information on the structure of the synchronic phonology, the process of lexicalization, and the effects morpho-syntax has on phonology. Of particular interest to me is the Bantu phenomenon of Morphological Bantu Spirantization. In languages with these phenomena, you often get completely different consonant-vowel interactions depending on the morphemic origin of a vowel. In Kinyarwanda for example, depending on the morphemic origin of the /j/, a /kj/ sequence could have the output of [c] or [ts]. I am quite interested in how the phonology is able to discern the morphemic origin of a phone so that it can determine which of two repairs to use. 

My morpho-syntax interests are primarily focused on the verbal domain, and how valency modifiers should be structured. I am especially interested in the structure  of the Bantu valency suffixes (often abbreviated as CARP for Causative, Applicative, Reciprocal, and Passive), how they attach to the verb stem, and the tetra-transitive verbs possible in Kinyarwanda and some other Bantu languages.

I am interested in many of the ongoing phonological changes in American English, such as T-glottalization, Flapping, and Vowel Shifts. I am mostly interested in how they may progress, and whether they have become lexicalized or not. I am also interested in the millennial
language game called "tots-ing", productive zero-derivation of causatives in English, and how features of AAVE are spreading and being incorporated into other varieties of English.