I received my PhD in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2020. You can see my full academic CV here.
Research & Publications
My research comes in two parts:
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On one side, I’m a fieldworker; my goal is to combine documentary methods with a strong theoretical grounding. I work primarily in various parts of Africa; at present my research is on the Khoekhoe language of Namibia.
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On the other side, I do theoretical work on the syntax-phonology interface. My primary interests here include: What is the nature of the linearization algorithm? Does prosody play a role in linearization? How much syntactic information does sentence phonology have access to?
My dissertation, titled Optimal Linearization: Prosodic displacement in Khoekhoegowab and beyond, looks at cases where the way that words are pronounced seems to influence what order they’re allowed to come in.
Selected publications & presentations:
- (2020) “Optimal Linearization: Word order typology with violable constraints.” Syntax. (preprint)
- (in submission) “Khoekhoegowab tone sandhi: New experimental evidence.” (manuscript)
- (2020) “Prosodic conditioning of word order in Khoekhoe.” Linguistic Society of America. [(slides)](/linguistics/lsa2020-prosodic displacement)
- (2019) “Minimal prosodic recursion in Khoekhoegowab.” Presented at Recursion in Phonology, Below and Above the Word, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. (slides)
- (2018) “An Itsy-Bitsy Puzzle: Asymmetric extraction from coordination in Khoekhoegowab.” Annual Conference on African Linguistics 49 (handout)