Research

I have an ongoing interest in linguistic representation and sensitivity to shifts in perspective, broadly speaking.

Recently, I've been examining the interpretation of predicates of personal taste (tasty, fun), in narrative and in conversation. Some of this work suggests that a subset of judgement shift phenomena known as interrogative flip might be tied more generally to a notion of commitment in discourse.

My undergraduate honors thesis compiled a few years work into the interpretation of perspective-dependent epithets (that jerk). The project mainly focused on factors of preceding discourse, including attitude predicates (say, tell, think, believe) that centered characters as the judges of epithets. For instance, for at least some speakers of English, if I utter the passage "Edith told me Xavier was in the library. That dork is studying for the statistics final.", the epithet that dork can reflect Edith's opinion of Xavier rather than my own opinion. My results indicate the relationship between these cues and the interpretation of jerk is not structurally dictated.

Ongoing research seeks to determine the correlation between individual differences—including linguistic experience and measures of cognitive difference like the Autism-Spectrum Quotient—and differing strategies for considering perspective shifts in narrative.

I have collaborated with others on a variety of other projects in human sentence processing, on the topics of negation and verb phrase ellipsis. These projects share the goals of examining empirically testable predictions from theoretical hypotheses in the domains of linguistics and psycholinguistics.

Collaborators include Lyn Frazier (UMass Linguistics), Chuck Clifton (UMass Psychology), and Stephanie Rich (UCSC Linguistics).

In collaboration with Alice Harris (UMass Amherst), I have begun work with the Nakh-Dagestanian language Udi, spoken in Nij and Oghuz, Azerbaijan and Zinobiani, Georgia, as well as its medieval predecessor, Caucasian Albanian (also known as Aghwan or Old Udi). You can learn more about the Udi people and their history on Wikipedia.

With Alice Harris, I conducted an investigation into the location of person-marking clitics in Caucasian Albanian texts, concluding that the complex rules for determining the clitics' position in Udi (Harris 2002) were present in a looser form in the older language, barring the most typologically unusual form in Udi, the endoclitic within the verb root.

In the spring of 2018, I traveled with Alice Harris to Nij to facilitate the development of an experiment into the processing of various clitic positions in Udi, and was fortunate to enjoy the hospitality and generosity of the Udi people. I plan to return for future research.