Manuscripts

Below you will find links to a number of papers that have not (yet) been published. Work that has already appeared in print is available on my cv page.

Association with focus
To appear	Scalar reasoning and the semantics of let alone. In Papers from the Forty-Fourth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
To appear	The relevance of focus: The case of let alone reopened. In María Biezma, Christopher Davis, and Jesse Harris, eds. UMOP 39: Papers in pragmatics. Amherst, MA: GLSA.
Northern Paiute
To appear	Descent and diffusion in language diversification: A study of Western Numic dialectology. With Molly Babel, Andrew Garrett, and Michael J. Houser. International Journal of American Linguistics.
	Abstract: The two branches of Western Numic are the Mono and Northern Paiute languages. We argue that this taxonomic structure did not arise as usually assumed in historical linguistics, through increased differentiation brought about by changes internal to each branch, but rather that diffusion between Western and Central Numic played a crucial role in forming the Western Numic family tree. More generally, we suggest that diffusion plays a greater role in language diversification than is usually recognized.
To appear	Patterns of nominalization in Numic. International Journal of American Linguistics 76.
	Abstract: I examine deverbal nominalization in the Numic branch of Uto-Aztecan and reconstruct an inventory of nominalizer suffixes for Proto-Numic. While some of the protoforms have been supplanted in the daughter languages, others have not changed at all. I attribute this difference in stability to a distinction between the nomenclative and constructional functions of nominalization. The data for this study, compiled from a survey of dictionaries and grammars, comprises some 2,000 forms and is included in an appendix.
Ellipsis and VPX
Submitted	Defective auxiliaries in Danish and English. With Michael J. Houser and Line Mikkelsen.
	Abstract: While do-support has been intensely studied in English, parallel constructions in other Germanic languages remain poorly understood. We investigate the Danish verb gøre 'to do', which occurs with the same function in a subset of the environments that license do-support—with verb phrase topicalization, verb phrase ellipsis, and verb phrase pronominalization. We analyze Danish gøre as a defective auxiliary: unlike other auxiliaries, it cannot value inflectional features on the main verb. Auxiliary gøre thus only appears when the main verb, and these features along with it, are eliminated through alternate means, namely, ellipsis, pronominalization, or topicalization. The position of gøre in embedded clauses and its distribution under other auxiliaries rule out analyses of gøre as occupying either a higher verbal projection, T, or a lower one, v. This detailed study of Danish gøre offers a new perspective on English do-support, one in which it is not a unified syntactic phenomenon.