My main research interests lie in the field of language description and documentation. Since late 2016, I have been working with the Sanapaná people in La Esperanza to document their oral history and to describe the grammar of the language. This work, as well as work on a Sanapaná dictionary, is conducted in collaboration with the people of the local organisation Yenna'teskama Nenhlet Apayvoma ('Fortifying the Sanapaná Language'). I am furthermore interested in describing social variation in the use of the Sanapaná language. With John Elliott (University of Hawai'i) and Raina Heaton (University of Oklahoma), we have also started investigations into the diachrony and diversification of the Enlhet-Enenlhet language family.
Since early 2019 I have been involved with the Uniform Meaning Representation project (a collaboration between the University of New Mexico, University of Colorado, and Brandeis University), which aims to design a representation to capture the semantic content of natural language texts, abstracting away from language-specific morphosyntactic expressions. Specifically, I was involved in designing the tense, aspect, and modality part of the annotation, as well as ensuring that UMR can felicitously be applied cross-linguistically.
I also have an interest in typological topics, specifically regarding argument structure, valency, and alignment. More specifically, I have worked on analyses of hierarchical alignment systems in the Guaykuruan languages, a cross-linguistic analysis of active-inactive alignment, a diachronic cross-linguistic study of the origins of causative-applicative polysemy, and a lexical study of causative-applicative polysemy in Sanapaná.