 constructing theories... |
 ...testing predictions |
Theoretical Interests
Although I self-identify as a phonologist, I work actively in areas ranging from phonetics to syntax. This is because, when one works with raw data, it is not immediately obvious if some phenomenon is “phonetic,” “phonological,” “syntactic,” or something else. To some extent, this is true for anyone who does fieldwork, but it is especially true in Athabaskan linguistics, owing, ultimately, to the polysynthetic verbal morphology of these languages, full of irregularities and discontinuous dependencies. For example, I hypothesized that an instance of unpredictable deletion of a certain morpheme was prosodically conditioned, due to tonal feet. I then looked for phonetic evidence for these tonal feet in the pitch track (morphology-phonetics), which I found. These tonal feet also condition gemination of ejectives, which is controversial, so I measured the oral closure duration (phonology-phonetics) and found very robust evidence for geminates (1.7-2.0 times the length of singletons). In the process of doing this, just looking at the pitch track, I also happened to notice that, with regards to the famous ye/we alternation, NP/PP constituents marked with ye trigger tonal downstep on the verb, while constituents marked with we do not (one actually gets pitch-reset), which in turn is evidence for different syntactic constituency (syntax-phonology). So it’s all connected.
That said, here’s what I’ve been up to...
Phonetics
I have been working with Heriberto Avelino to improve my Praat skills, so that, when I go up to the Arctic, I’ll be able to do all the phonetics I want right on my laptop. So far my work has been limited to duration and F0, and doing basic statistics with these, but I am hoping to become more adept with vowel formants, nasality, and laryngeal features. I also still need to take the statistics class. Schmoo.
Phonology
For a couple years I was working in Lubowicz’s (2003) Contrast Preservation Theory, though recently I’ve reverted to a Lexical Phonology framework, just because the latter is descriptively more transparent. My second Qualifying Paper is entitled, “From Agglutination to Fusion: Coalescence in Lexical Phonology.” In this paper I look at instances where segmentation into morphemes is not obvious, i.e. cases intermediate between agglutination and fusion, mostly within Athabaskan. More generally, I’m into tones, geminates, metrical phonology, and formal issues in Optimality Theory.
Morphology
This is the area where I intend to work for my dissertation. Morphology is generally treated as an epiphenomenon of diachronic change in syntax and phonology, and/or an arbitrary list of facts (whether those facts are stated as the list of the language’s morphemes, or a list of “word-formation rules,” which is effectively the same thing). Generative grammar has de facto been operating under an emergentist theory of morphology for the past 50 years. This is inconsistent with the goals of the generative program, and with OT in particular. In phonology, Optimality Theory seeks to explain both inventories and phonotactics. That is, we seek to explain what is a possible sound-category in some language (and make generalizations about possible sound-categories cross-linguistically) and what happens when we put sounds together. In morphology, there has been some work in morphotactics, but virtually nothing, in a generative framework, which seeks to answer the question, “what is a possible morpheme?”Happily, I am developing an Optimality-Theoretic model of morphological typology which combines Contrast Preservation Theory (Lubowicz 2003) and String-Based Correspondence (McCarthy 2005). It’s a wee bit too complicated to get into here, but see the “Downloadable Delights” page for a titillating preview.