How are contemporary second language speakers of Potawatomi maintaining traditional Potawatomi? What particular discourse and morphosyntactic phenomena match traditional Potawatomi and which are undergoing shift? Who is speaking contemporary Potawatomi and how  do they constitute a community of practice? This is what I investigage in my work on New Speakers. 

In the wake of shift and loss, how do speakers of Potawatomi understand and interpret variables and registers as socially meaningful? What methods of meaning making do speakers cultivate within their communities of practice across space and time? Diachronically, are there ways to reconstruct historical varieties or dialects? 

In my work on morphosyntax, I investigate the exponence of the clausal spine, particularly at the left edge. How do speakers today come to interpret long distance agreement or understand the function of complementizer heads? What analytic and synthetic pieces of the grammar do we see in the language today?