Projects

My research interests lie primarily in the study of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and the interaction between them, both synchronic and diachronic. My language interests center around the Iranian languages, in particular Farsi (Southwestern Iranian), which I speak, and Dari (language of the Iranian Zoroastrians; Northwestern Iranian) and Numic (Uto-Aztecan), specifically the Mono Lake variety of Northern Paiute—as well as Germanic (English and Danish).

Some of my current research projects, with embedded links to related papers and talk handouts, follow:

Association with focus
In my dissertation, entitled Association with foci, I explore association with focus, a phenomenon where the meaning of certain expression, such as only and even, varies with the position of focus. I introduce a novel class of expressions that I argue associate with not one focus but two foci. I develop detailed analyses of two of these dyadic focus operators: adversative but and let alone. Unlike only and even, their meaning is not, however, affected by focus, though these expressions are all unified in another way. They all require a focus somewhere inside each of their arguments. This does not arise because they have a conventional dependency on focus itself but because of how they constrain their discourse context. If the discourse is structured by (sometimes implicit) questions, the restriction on the position of focus follows from a general constraint on questions and their answers: the answer must be congruent to the question under discussion. I presented some of my work on adversative but at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the LSA, for which there is a handout. For let alone, I have written a number of short papers, including one for SALT 18, one for CLS 44, and a UMOP working paper.

Dari
With my research partner Annahita Farudi, who is currently at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, I have been conducting ongoing research on the language of the Iranian Zoroastrians, which they call Dari (a Northwestern Iranian language that is distinct from the dialect of Persian spoken in Afghanistan). This started with a number of fieldwork trips to Yazd, Iran during the summers of 2003, 2004, and 2005 (see some pictures), but our efforts since have been concentrated on constructing an online dictionary and text corpus using narratives that we collected and analyzed while in Iran.

• Complex predicates
  We have been using this corpus for a subproject on the structure of complex predicates. We use Dari's ergative verbal agreement to probe the structure of complex predicates (predicates comprised of a nonverbal element plus light verb). In a recent talk, we argue that nominal nonverbal elements, when the complex predicate is semantically intransitive, have the status of direct object.

Mono Lake Northern Paiute
I work with Michael Houser and Molly Babel, under the direction of Andrew Garrett, to document and study the Mono Lake variety of Northern Paiute, spoken north of Mono Lake on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. The most interesting, and important, aspect of our work on Paiute is collaborating with Grace Dick and several Paiute elders to create an online dictionary for the language. The dictionary includes audio examples for each entry and comes with a crossreferenced text database. Some pictures from our fieldwork trips can be found here. I have a number of related subprojects:

• Western Numic dialectology
  We were working to establish the precise place of the Mono Lake dialect of Northern Paiute in the Numic family when we realized that the linguistic boundary between the two languages of Western Numic, Mono and Northern Paiute, may be the result of diffusion across the boundary with Central Numic. We recently finished a paper that has been submitted for publication.
• Nominalization in Numic
  For my first qualifying paper, I tried to understand the synchronic functions and diachronic source(s) of the set of nominalizers found in each of the Numic languages. I propose a reconstruction for Proto-Numic that leads to the interesting question of why some of the nominalizers have been maintained in all of the daughter languages, while others have been mostly lost. This paper has been accepted for publication in IJAL.

Danish VPX
This is an ongoing project in collaboration with my advisor Line Mikkelsen and fellow Berkeley graduate student Michael Houser to understand the syntax and pragmatics of three verb phrase anaphoric constructions in Danish: verb phrase ellipsis (VPE), verb phrase pronominalization (VPP), and verb phrase topicalization (VPT). Our research to date has focussed on two areas:

• Syntax of VPP
  VPP is a type of verbal anaphora in which a proform det stands in for a verb phrase. What is cool about this construction is that it has properties of both VPE and VPT. We presented some of our research at WECOL 2006 which resulted in a conference proceedings paper.
• Gøre-support
  A side issue that emerged while we were investigating the VPX constructions was that of gøre-support, a type of expletive auxiliary equivalent of do-support in English that does not, however, show up with negation or in questions (ostensibly since Danish is V2). Gøre shows up only in VPX contexts. Some of our thoughts on the subject have been written up in a paper that has been submitted for publication.