Research Projects
Our work on Kalaallisut (Greenlandic) investigates the intersections of spatial relations, landscape and naming practices, using the principles of ethnophysiography and landscape linguistics as a framework for our analysis.
Language contact in Northern Indiana
This project investigates the linguistic practice and attitudes of one such Old Order Amish community in Elkhart county, Indiana. Such communities offer a unique perspective on the effects of stable bilingualism and intensive contact over many generations.
The Language is a Map: Spatial Reference in traditional Narratives in MalakMalak and Matngele
This project studies the Dreamtime narratives, creation stories, of indigenous Australians of two neighboring languages. This research offers exceptional insight into language and literary contact in a highly diverse multilingual and multicultural setting.
This project seeks to bring Sora and other understudied languages to the discourse on noun incorporation. Additionally, it questions existing theoretical claims about noun incorporation: chiefly that noun incorporation is derived by head movement (Baker 1998). Head movement as it stands cannot account for the incorporation of a subject/agent because that would require movement out of a specifier, which is antithetical to the entire theory of head movement.
Indiscriminacy in Cuevas Mixtec
This project investigates the properties of two kinds of indefinite in Cuevas Mixtec, free choice items and indiscriminatives, and seeks to establish the first model of indiscriminative meaning crosslinguistically. Additionally, a basic dictionary is developed.
Shared Homesign Systems in Guatemala
This project is an examination of emergent homesign systems in the town of Nebaj, Guatemala. Our work documents the homesign systems of individual children in different communicative ecologies to understand the impact of communicative interaction on the consistency of an individual’s homesign system over time and the cohesion of a system shared by homesigners in contact.
Documentation and Analysis of Tuparí
This project is focused on comprehensive documentation and analysis of Tuparí, a little-studied Tupían language spoken in the Brazilian Amazon. In addition to providing the most complete grammatical description yet produced for Tuparí, this research will culminate in an analysis of the language’s system of grammatical relations and its usage of resumptive pronouns.