About me: I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. I am a syntactician and a fieldworker who enjoys the empirical challenges associated with researching understudied languages and exploring how novel empirical data from understudied languages informs syntactic theory. Much of my research is focused on interactions between syntax-semantics and syntax-phonology/prosody. In order to reconcile my goals as a fieldworker with my goals as a theoretician, I also spend considerable time refining techniques and methodology for data collection in my fieldwork, including development of novel techniques.
Recent News:
I recently gave a talk at Georgetown titled: "Dissecting speech reports and tracking down Sources", which argues that communication predicates have a stative core, which introduces a Source as its subject. The behavior of this core covaries with the particular properties of what it combines with.
In collaboration with Gary Thoms (NYU) and Gülnar Eziz (Harvard), I gave a talk at NELS titled, "Raised heads and subjects in Turkic genitive subject relatives", which argues that there A-movement of the subject out of relative clauses in Uyghur in addition to evidence for a raising analysis of the head noun.
Harold Torrence and I recently published a paper titled "Escape from Noun Complement Clauses in Avatime" in a special volume of Languages titled "Escaping African Islands" (edited by Jason Kandybowicz).