Typology and diachrony

I view all of my research from an inherently typological perspective, and take diachronic and areal patterns into account at every turn. I am involved in a number of projects related to typology and diachrony, which I briefly summarize here. 

STAMP 

I am interested in the morphophonology of STAMP morphs – portmanteau morphs which include Subject features as well as Tense, Aspect, Mood, and/or Polarity (negation) features. In collaboration with Hannah Sande (UC Berkeley) and Karee Garvin (Harvard), I have conducted a typological survey of STAMP morphs in languages across the Macro-Sudan Belt of West and Central Africa. As STAMP morphs exhibit properties of both pronouns and auxiliaries, they are a challenge to implement in many theoretical models, and they offer unique insight into the interface between morphology and phonology, and the division of labor between the two. The findings of this project bear on questions about what kinds of morphophonological processes may apply across word boundaries, and have allowed us to posit a historical cline from decomposable segmental subjects and auxiliaries, to phonologically fused subject-auxiliary complexes, to syntactic portmanteaux. A paper on presenting the results of our typological survey is soon to appear in a volume published by Language Sciences Press. 

The Kru family

I have compiled a typological database of Kru, in collaboration with undergrad research apprentices Javier Mokkarala-Lopez, Myra Siddiqui and Nyssa Combs. This database includes a lexicon of nearly 800 lexical items across 60 distinct varieties of Kru, as well as information on phonological inventories, tonal systems, and tense/aspect/polarity morphology across languages. With this data, I have begun to develop comparative and diachronic analyses on a variety of topics. Many of my findings are included in a chapter on tone in Kru languages co-authored with Hannah Sande, to appear in a volume on Tone Phenomena in African Languages which will be published by Language Science Press. I have additionally conducted a survey of marking of negation as a change in subject tone across languages of the Eastern Kru subfamily in Côte d'Ivoire. I have found that the historical cline I have proposed in other work on STAMP morphs is exactly borne out in this subfamily, as different languages represent distinct steps in the pathway from separate subjects and auxiliaries to syntactic portmanteaux. 

The Potou branch

Atchan (ISO: ebr) and Nghlwa (ISO: gwa) are the two languages which make up the Potou branch of the Kwa language family. Both languages are spoken in and around Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. While the Kwa family is relatively well-studied, the Potou branch, which consists just of these two somewhat far-removed languages, remains underdocumented and understudied. I am interested in comparing these two languages in order to develop a greater understanding of the origins of several morphophonological phenomena, like morpheme-specific nasalization. In joint work with Alexandra Pfiffner and Lindsay Hatch (both UC Berkeley), I have compared the phonetics of implosives between the two languages, and look forward to further collaboration in this area. 

Nasal harmony in Tupian

I have also been involved in a typological survey of nasal harmony systems across the Tupian family, in conjunction with Myriam Lapierre at the University of Washington. We find that all languages of the family can be categorized into one of four types of nasal harmony, classified in terms of the directions of [+nasal] and [-nasal] spreading. We put forth a proposal for how these distinct systems may have emerged over time, modeled through different rankings of the same constraints. Crucially, all languages obey the same high-ranked constraint: adjacent segment edges must match in their value for [+/-nasal]. The actual surface outcome for each harmony system is determined by the relative weighting or ranking of relevant faithfulness and markedness constraints.