Matthew Zaslansky

"There is no wealth like knowledge, no poverty like ignorance." - Nahj al-Balāghah

Research Interests:

Morphology
Morphosyntax (Number, Causatives, Argument structure)
Corpus linguistics and fieldwork
Languages of the Caucasus
Sign languages
Turkic

An important fact about language is that the linguistic system allows for the creation of new words and sentences, even if we've never heard them before. Sometimes there is variation in this system, such as the past tense in English: Is shrank or shrunk the past tense of shrink; is dreamt or dreamed the past tense of dream? English speakers sometimes say both. As a linguist, I am primarily interested in describing this variation in languages with rich morphological structure, and in tracking the stability of said variation within the system over time. Such variation leads to competition, and that competition can lead to natural selection, so I take an evolutionary perspective in my work. I have a nascent interest in using corpora and psycholinguistic methods in my research.

Current Projects:

Putting dialectal variation on a keychain in Sheki, 2018

Morphological complexity and the dual in American Sign Language

Linguists have long noted the apparent morphological complexity of American Sign Language, and have often attributed this to the preference for non-concatenative morphology in the visual-spatial modality. One area of particularly complexity in the verbal morphology of ASL is the dual, which can be realized by at least three allomorphs in verbal paradigms which already show wide a lot of variation. In this project I investigate the realization of dual marking across different verb classes.

Sign Languages of the Caucasus

The varieties of Sign Languages used in the Caucasus are a main research interest of mine. I am currently working on describing these varieties, particularly focusing on the inflectional system of Azerbaijani Sign Language and have recently begun working with Georgian Sign Language as part of a Fulbright Research Grant.

See the video for more information about this project.

Blocking and form-meaning mismatches in Turkic

Turkic languages are known for their agglutinative morphology, which is generally juxtaposing and displays a clear form-to-meaning isomorphism.

Azerbaijani and its dialects violate this otherwise prevailing isomorphism in several ways, such as in the ongoing reorganization of the language's voice paradigm, detailed in a recent paper published in a special edition of STUF on the emergence of middle voice systems.

Paper available from the publisher here: Zaslansky, Matthew. 2023. The Turkic middle voice system: deponency and paradigm reorganization. STUF - Language Typology and Universals 76(2): 165-194. https://doi.org/10.1515/stuf-2023-2007

Another such violation is the overabundance of the Azerbaijani perfect forms.

- A diachronic investigation shows that while there is not complete blocking across the competing perfect markers in Azerbaijani, there is a trend towards blocking driven in part by an interaction between the evidential and perfect categories:

Click here for paper: Zaslansky, Matthew. 2019. The overabundance of the perfect and the restriction of evidentiality in Standard Azerbaijani: A diachronic study of -(y)Ib and -mIş. In Jeretič & Sağ (eds.) Proceedings of the Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic 4, 104-118.

Click here for the handout from Tu+4.

- A more detailed investigation of the synchronic distribution of the perfect markers shows blocking (i.e. differentiation) primarily occurs in the category of person, as opposed to differentiation at the lexical or pragmatic level.

Click here for paper: Zaslansky, Matthew. 2019. Systematic overabundance exhibits systematic differentiation: On person marking, perfect marking, and evidentiality in Azerbaijani . In Semushina & Rodriguez (eds.) San Diego Linguistic Papers 7, 34-52.

Zaqatala, 2018

I am also currently working on a description of multiple exponent causative constructions in Azerbaijani and Karakalpak. I suggest that multiple causative constructions in the language are instances of reinforcement ME, and am currently exploring ways to test the relationship between causative suffix productivity and ME.

- I assess the challenge Karakalpak data raise for the Determinism Asssumption in joint work with Farrell Ackerman & Robert Malouf at the 57th Annual Meeting of the SLE. Click here for slides.
- Bakhitgul Kdirbaeva and I present novel data from Karakalpak at ICTL20 on ME in the Karakalpak causative. Click here for poster and handout.

Turkicisms in Qəbələ Lezgian

My article on the role played by Turkic voice matter in Lezgian variety spoken in Yeni Dizaxlı village is available from the Journal of Endangered Languages.

Zaslansky, Matthew. 2023. The Turko-Lezgic Voice Paradigm of Yeni Dizaxlı Lezgian. Journal of Endangered Languages 13(22): 197-217.

I presented on borrowed Turkic voice paradigms in the Qəbələ dialect of Lezgian.

My presentation to TU+7 is available here.

Zaqatala Avar

I have been involved with the Avar community of Zaqatala (Azerbaijan) in the basic description of local dialects of Avar, which differ significantly from the standard literary language used in Daghestan.

Presentations resulting from this project are available below.

- In collaboration with Savithry Namboodiripad, I presented some experimental evidence for syntactic flexibility in the Dzhar (Djar) dialect of Avar at the Russian Academy of Sciences for the Linguistic Forum 2019, slides available here.

Zaslansky, Matthew & Savithry Namboodiripad. 2019. Syntactic flexibility in the Djar dialect of Avar: Experimental evidence from basic constituent order. Paper presented at Linguistic Forum 2019: Indigenous languages of Russia and beyond.

- A (very brief) presentation on gender marking in Dzhar Avar for the Batumi Summer School in Caucasiology is available here.

Zaslansky, Matthew. 2019. Morphosyntactic variation and contact in a very small space: Double-gender nouns in Dzhar Avar. Paper presented at the Batumi Summer School in Digital Caucasiology.

Past Projects: