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VP anaphora and VP topicalization

I am interested in VP topicalization and VP anaphora constructions, especially ones that involve an overt proform. The latter are found in several Germanic languages (including Danish, Dutch, English, German, Norwegian, and Swedish), but there is relatively little work on these, compared with the very large literature on VP ellipsis. In joint work with Michael Houser, Maziar Toosarvandani, and early on also Ange Strom-Weber, I am investigating VP topicalization and VP anaphora constructions in Danish, including their interactions with verb second, auxiliaries (A defective auxiliary in Danish), and A-bar extraction (Verb Phrase Pronominalization in Danish: Deep or Surface Anaphora?). We have buildt an annotated and searchable database of attested examples, which is accessible accessible from a separate project website. Most recently, I have started working with Dan Hardt and Bjarne Ørsnes on orphans hosted by VP anaphora

DP structure and definiteness marking

Together with Jorge Hankamer at UCSC, I've been investigating the morphosyntax of definiteness marking in Scandinavian languages, primarily Danish, and its interactions with the internal structure of DPs in these languages, including attributive adjectives, relative clauses, and PP modifiers. Most recently, we have investigated the structure of pseudopartitives and how it interacts with definiteness marking (Definiteness marking and the structure of Danish pseudopartitives), and we are currently working on definiteness marking in DPs containing clausal complements to N.

Karuk Language Project

I am working with my Berkeley colleague Andrew Garrett on the Karuk language of Northern California. Our goals include linguistic documentation and the creation of resources for community language programs. We are currently developing an online archive of Karuk texts and audio recording and integrating these with the Karuk dictionary created by William Bright and Susan Gehr. Visit Karuk Dictionary and Texts and Karuk language resources.