I'm primarily a phonetician/phonologist, but I've also done some morphological and syntactic work in my languages of interest.
In the broadest terms, I am generally interested in using phonetic data to answer phonological questions. These questions usually involve the nature of phonological primitives (segments & features), the timing of laryngealization and secondary articulation, prosodic phonological structure, and diachronic change within segmental inventories.
As part of ongoing community-led revitalization efforts for the Itza' language (Yucatecan Mayan, estimated 37 L1 speakers), we are examining differences in the production of ejective stops by L1 and L2 speakers. As language teaching is being led by fluent L2 speakers, and ejectives are an aspect of the language that is very salient to learners, we are interested in examining usage of these segments by learners.
Additionally, with financial support from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, we are in the process of archiving a collection of audio cassettes containing Itza' language materials, in order to make their contents more accessible to the community and usable for creation of pedagogical resources or for linguistic study.
This project seeks to describe the laryngeal contrast found in fricatives in Tal, an underdocumented West Chadic language of Nigeria, which is reported to have voiced, voiceless, and voiceless aspirated fricatives. Contrasts in aspiration on fricatives are reported in less than 1% of the world’s languages, and fricative aspiration is underdescribed. Unlike some Sino-Tibetan languages with aspirated fricatives, Tal does not appear to have a distinct period of aspiration following the release of the oral constriction, making the contrast in the two voiceless series acoustically subtle. We aim to determine a clear set of phonetic cues marking this distinction.
Northern Sámi (Uralic) is relatively well known in the phonological literature for having a ternary duration contrast in consonants and vowels: in certain positions within the word, vowels and consonants may be short, long, or overlong. These duration differences are a result of different associations of segments to moras, and all vowels (monophthongs and diphthongs) are reported to appear in all three lengths, while consonants may undergo "gradation" (changes in duration or fortition/lenition). However, contrary to previous descriptions, words where the first vowel is a mid-vowel diphthong /ea oa/ or long /aː/ show distinct prosodic patterns from other words. I argue based on both phonetic and phonological evidence that these vowels are distinct from the others in the Northern Sámi inventory in that they only have two possible length degrees. This finding is also informative about the nature of preaspiration in the language,supporting claims from my dissertation research that this is a laryngeal feature that depends on prosodic structure.
My MA research focused on labialization in Tigrinya (Ethio-Semitic), and I subsequently undertook a collaborative project on long-distance palatalization in Harari (Ethio-Semitic). I am interested in the articulatory and acoustic realization of secondary articulations, their diachronic origins, and their mobility and phonological connectivity to the "primary" segment. These patterns sometimes challenge our understanding of segments, features, and prosodic structure, making them an insightful domain for phonological research. In many ways, laryngealization can also behave like a secondary articulation, and this parallel led into my dissertation work on aspiration and preaspiration.
My doctoral dissertation began as an extension of this work, and grew into a typological, phonological, and phonetic investigation of preaspiration. The representation of laryngeal features is often streamlined into an elegant and symmetrical system in theoretical phonology, overlooking some well-reported fundamental laryngeal asymmetries. The primary argument of the thesis is that preaspiration is not the phonological mirror image of postaspiration, and always involves an association to prosodic structure and moraic weight. The dissertation presents a typological look at preaspiration patterns, making use of both phonetic data and phonological processes across a diverse range of language families to illustrate this connection.
The partitive case in Finnish has attracted a lot of attention in the area of aspectual research, as it signals not only nominal quantity but also atelicity and imperfectivity independently of verbal inflection, and is associated with clause polarity. However, most theoretical analyses of Finnish case marking do not consider the full range of uses of the partitive case, and thus fail to unify all of the case alternations seen in the language in an intuitive and elegant way. In addition to this, the facts of Estonian case marking are very similar but distinct, and analyses of aspect and case marking in this language are far outnumbered by those for Finnish. My second doctoral qualifying paper undertook a syntactic investigation of aspect and case marking in these two languages, seeking to present all instances of partitive case marking in a unified way. The most recent incarnation of this project is available as a 2017 proceedings paper from the CLA annual meeting, available on the CV page.