Overview
My research addresses a range of descriptive and typological issues in linguistics using a diverse set of methodologies. Most of my projects are in some way related to Uyghur, phonetics-phonology, or both. Other topics include syntax, typology, conceptual metaphor, language contact and change, and literature and translation. Whenever possible, I base my research on naturalistic data, i.e. spoken or written language produced by native speakers for other native speakers in real communicative situations. Methodologies include acoustic analysis of spoken language, corpus studies of written language, elicitation of experimental tasks, consultation with native speakers, statistical modeling, and (for languages outside the range of my own knowledge) consultation of reference works and annotated texts. My dissertation will expand our knowledge of how prosody works in Uyghur, including both corpus-based and experimental work on stress and intonation.
Projects
Corpus of Conversational Uyghur
In collaboration with the Uyghur Projects Foundation, I am building a public corpus of unplanned conversations in Uyghur. The conversations are recorded by participants in their own homes or other spaces with no researcher present, on any topic or content they happen to be talking about. The corpus website includes the audio files as well as transcripts with morphological annotation and translation to English.
Publications
Peer-reviewed articles, conference proceedings, and book chapters
submitted Focus-marking in Uyghur and the typology of phrase-level prominence. Phonological Data & Analysis.
2025 Uyghur vowel devoicing: phonetics and phonology. Turkic Languages 29, 30-53.
2025 “Uyghur palatal harmony as bidirectional (root-controlled) harmony,” Proceedings of Ninth Workshop on Turkic and
Languages in Contact with Turkic (TU+9).
2024 (with Matthew Gordon) Vowel harmony: statistical perspectives on typological distribution. In Nancy A.
Ritter and Harry van der Hulst., eds. The Oxford Handbook of Vowel Harmony.
2024 (with Haibibullah Abdul-Kerim) The prosody of post-predicate position in Uyghur. Proceedings of
Chicago Linguistics Society Annual Meeting 2023, University of Chicago
2023 Conceptual metaphor in areal perspective: Time, space, and contact in the Sinosphere. Language and
Cognition.
2021 The grammaticalization cline of the Uyghur converb: syntax, morphology, and prosody, Proceedings of
Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics (ConCALL-4), Indiana University.
2021 Phonologically motivated orthographic variation in Modern Uyghur: the voicing of /h/, Proceedings of
Sixth Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic (TU+6), University of Toronto.
2019 Phonetic characteristics of devoiced vowels in Uyghur, Proceedings of International Congress of
Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019), Melbourne
2017 Friends, enemies, and fools: A collection of Uyghur proverbs. GIALens, October 2017.
2011 Bound nominal roots in Waorani. GIALens, January 2011.
2009 Morphophonemic gemination in Latin. GIAL Occasional Papers in Linguistics, Summer 2009.
Presentations and talks
2025 A corpus-based account of constituent order in the Uyghur noun phrase. Tenth Workshop on Turkic and Languages
in Contact with Turkic (TU+10), University of Southern California.
2024 Uyghur palatal harmony as bidirectional (root-controlled) harmony, Ninth Workshop on Turkic and
Languages in Contact with Turkic (TU+9), Cornell University.
2023 Introducing the Corpus of Conversational Uyghur. Central Eurasian Studies Society Annual
Conference (CESS 2023), University of Pittsburgh.
2023 The prosody of post-predicate position in Uyghur. Chicago Linguistics Society Annual Meeting,
University of Chicago.
2023 Weight and directionality in the stress of case-marked nominals in Uyghur. Lightning talk and poster
presentation. LSA 97th Annual Meeting, part of organized session “Stress at the phonetics-phonology
interface: the special case of default-to-opposite patterns.”
2021 From syntax to morphology: grammaticalization on the converbs in Uyghur. 4th Conference on Central
Asian Languages and Linguistics (ConCALL-4), Indiana University.
2021 Phonologically motivated orthographic variation in Modern Uyghur: the voicing of /h/. Sixth Workshop
on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic (TU+6), University of Toronto.
2020 Negotiating conflicts between phonology and orthographic convention: final stop devoicing in Uyghur.
Dallas International Academic Lens (DIAL), Dallas International University.
2020 Variation in spelling of word-final stops in Uyghur. Lightning talk at Linguistics department Sneak Peek,
October 8, 2020.
2020 The morphosyntactic time-space continuum in Uyghur. New Adventures in Indigenous Languages
(NAIL) winter 2020.
2019 Turkic relative clauses in typological perspective. Wisconsin Intensive Summer Language Institutes
(WISLI) Joint Student Conference.
2019 Relative clauses in Uyghur. Lightning talk at Linguistics department Sneak Peek, May 30, 2019.
2019 Wisdom from the desert: Uyghur proverbs. New Adventures in Indigenous Languages (NAIL) winter
2019.
2016 The first hour with a new language: demonstration of a linguist’s language-learning method. At ZJNU,
November 22, 2016 (monolingual fieldwork demonstration with a speaker of Kiribati).