Research

My work relates structure, meaning, and discourse to highlight the roles that different modules of the grammar play in deriving linguistic phenomena. My work largely spans the syntax-semantics interface, but includes extensive connections with morphology and pragmatics.

Fieldwork

My work in syntactic and semantic theory is based on data collected through fieldwork with speakers of understudied languages. From 2015 to present, I have been working with speakers of Kalenjin languages (specifically Kipsigis and Tugen) to document and analyze these languages. Kalenjin languages comprise an understudied family of Nilo-Saharan languages, spoken by about 4 million people in eastern Africa (primarily Kenya). In addition, I have conducted research on Scottish Gaelic, based on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland. My Scottish Gaelic materials are here, while my Kalenjin materials are here--both in the California Language Archive.

Epistemic modality

I explore the ways in which speakers linguistically encode information about their knowledge state, ranging from work on epistemic indefinites to attitude reports in Kipsigis. These constructions provide a glimpse into the semantics-pragmatics interface and reveal how speakers convey information about their confidence in and evidence for their claims. This work also relates to the variety of syntactic complementation strategies that are often available in a language, since the semantics of the embedding verb often impact which complementation strategy is used.

Information structure

Particularly through my work on Kalenjin languages, I am interested in the syntactic encoding of information structure. My research seeks to understand and formalize the range of possible pragmatic features available to the syntactic component of a derivation and to understand how these features relate to each other. I also explore how different information structure-driven processes coexist within a single language (e.g. right edge topicalization alongside immediately postverbal discourse prominence).

Pronouns

Many languages have large inventories of pronouns, which compete for realization in certain contexts. My work aims to understand what semantic and pragmatic effects fall out of this pronominal competition and whether such effects can be traced to the internal structure of the pronouns. I get at these questions by carefully examining the syntactic distribution and interpretive effects of different pronouns in a given language.

Verb-initial languages

My research addresses these types of questions primarily through the lens of verb-initial languages, like the Kalenjin languages and Scottish Gaelic. Verb-initial languages are interesting because modern linguistic frameworks were not necessarily developed with them in mind. Understanding the mechanisms behind verb-initiality and the derivational timing of these processes is one of my research interests. In getting at these questions, I take a cross-linguistic perspective, allowing analyses of genetically-unrelated but typologically-similar languages to inform my work.