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Research
Some of my current research projects involve:
- Training Students for Fieldwork in Africa
I am co-PI with Jason Kandybowicz (of the CUNY Graduate Center) on this NSF-funded project. The project, “Training and Text Collection as a Vehicle for Recruiting and Retaining Endangered Language Fieldworkers”, involves training students to conduct fieldwork through hands-on, up-close work with native speakers of endangered and understudied languages spoken in Ghana. The team traveled to eastern Ghana in the summer of 2018 and conducted fieldwork on two Ghana-Togo Mountain languages: Avatime and Logba. While there, we did elicitation, text collection, and video documentation.
- Investigating Headless Relative Clauses
I am co-PI on a project, with Ivano Caponigro (UCSD) and Roberto Zavala (CIESAS San Cristóbal), to describe and document the morpho-syntax and semantics of headless relative clauses in Mesoamerican languages, with funding from a UC MEXUS-CONACYT grant. Although headless relative clauses (e.g., “We read what Mary wrote.”) are found in a number of Mesoamerican language, very little work has been done on the construction, relative to headed relative clauses. We have organized two workshops at the CIESAS institute in San Cristóbal, Chiapas. The workshops sought to train scholars, in particular junior native speaker linguists, to begin to collect data and compare notes on headless relative clauses in their languages of study and conduct their own research.
Publications
In Preparation
- “Left Edge Agreeing Elements in Wolof”
- “The Syntax of Wolof Factive Relative Clauses”
- “Negation in Cocuilotlatzala Mixtec”
- “Factive Relative Clauses in Seereer”
- “Verbal Complementizers in Ibibio”
Under Review
- “Indeterminate Pronouns in Kaqchikel”. (with Philip Duncan and Pedro Mateo).
- “Predicate Fronting with Verb Doubling in Krachi”. (with Jason Kandybowicz).
To Appear
- “A First Look at Krachi Clausal Determiners:. (with Jason Kandybowicz). Schuhschrift: Papers in Honor of Russell Schuh. (Email me for a copy.)
2018
- African Linguistics on the Prairie: Selected Papers from the 45th Annual Conference on African Linguistics.. (with Philip Duncan, Jason Kandybowicz, Travis Major). Language Science Press.
2017
- Africa’s Endangered Languages: Documentary and Theoretical Approaches. (with Jason Kandybowicz). Oxford University Press.
- “Africas-Endangered-Languages-An-Overview”. (with Jason Kandybowicz). Introductory chapter in Africa’s Endangered Languages: Documentary and Theoretical Approaches. Oxford University Press.
- “The-Role-of-Theory-in-Documentation: Intervention Effects and Missing Gaps in the Krachi Documentary Record” (with Jason Kandybowicz). In Africa’s Endangered Languages: Documentary and Theoretical Approaches. Oxford University Press.
2016
- “Predicate Focus in Krachi: 2 Probes, 1 Goal, 3 PFs”. (with Jason Kandybowicz). Proceedings of the 33rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics.
2015
- “Wh-Question Formation in Krachi”. (with Jason Kandybowicz). Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, vol. 36, no. 2. 253-285.
- “The Prosodic Licensing Wh-in-situ: Evidence from Krachi and Wasa”. (with Jason Kandybowicz). Selected Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference on African Linguistics.
2014
- “Mirror Principle Violations in Wolof”. (with Leston Buell and Mariame Sy). Connectedness: Papers by and for Sarah Van Wagenen. Carson T. Schütze & Linnaea Stockall (eds.), UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics 18: 71-101.
2013
- The Clause Structure of Wolof: Insights into the Left Periphery. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- “Free Relative Clauses in Two Mixtec Languages”. (with Ivano Caponigro and Carlos Cisneros). International Journal of American Linguistics, vol. 79, no. 1, pp. 61-96.
- “ComparativeTano Interrogative Syntax: The View from Krachi and Bono”. (with Jason Kandybowicz). Selected Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference on African Linguistics, Olanike Ola Orie and Karen W. Saunders (eds), pp. 222-234. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.