Surface Correspondence & Consonant Co-Occurrence Relations
Long-distance consonant assimilation/dissimilation processes have a different constellation of properties than their adjacency-based counterparts. Surface correspondence has been a valuable tool for explaining long-distance consonant assimilation. I'm interested in refining the theory and exploring its consequences, particularly investigating how it connects to long-distance dissimilatory phenomena. This is what I wrote my dissertation about, and you can read it here if you don't want to buy the book version.
Defaka & Nkọrọọ
I worked on a project (led by Akin Akinlabi & Bruce Connell) to document two endangered Nigerian languages, Defaka & Nkoroo. Defaka is critically endangered, with speakers shifting to Nkọrọọ as their primary language (though Nkọrọọ is itself in significant long-term danger as well). Both languages are interesting in a myriad of ways, and we are currently working on a grammar and dictionary of each. (Click on the language names for more information about the project.)
Phonology of Clicks
Click consonants raise a lot of interesting questions, many of which are still unanswered. My research on clicks revolves around how they pattern cross-linguistically and typologically - what constraints there are on their distribution (both universally and on a language-specific basis), and how those constraints can be explained.
Phonetics and Phonology of South African languages
South Africa has a ton of official languages, but many of them are still seriously under-researched. We know enough about these languages to know that they surely pose interesting questions and potentially significant insights for linguistic theory, but the basic description that would let us address those questions is often lacking. Some of my more recent work is focused on exploring phonotactic generalizations and phonetic facts in more detail in these languages, including isiXhosa, isiZulu, Setswana, and Xitsonga (so far).
Khoisan languages of South(ern) Africa
The first indigenous languages of Southern Africa are the languages of the Khoe and San peoples. Many of them are extinct, and still more are in danger of dying out. In several cases, these languages have been prematurely labelled as dead, even though there are still fluent first-language speakers. One of the things I've been working on more recently is a project to find any last speakers of some of these languages, with the longer-term aim of helping them and their communities preserve their languages while they can still be recorded.
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