Research
My research interests span two primary areas: language documentation and description on the one hand, and formal syntax and semantics on the other.
Language Documentation and Description
I do fieldwork on Badiaranke, an endangered Atlantic (Niger-Congo) language spoken in southern Senegal, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau. Speakers of Badiaranke constitute an extreme minority, both ethnically and linguistically, in a region dominated by Fulacounda/Pularfuta and Mandinka/Malinke (Fulacounda and Mandinka in Senegal, Pularfuta and Malinke in Guinea). The ultimate goal of my research is to produce a comprehensive description and extensive documentation of the Badiaranke language.
In the summer of 2004, I made my first trip to set up a fieldwork site and begin data collection on Badiaranke. I carried out my research in Paroumba, a village of approximately 500 inhabitants in south-central Senegal (Region of Kolda, Department of Velingara). The work consisted mostly of elicitation from consultants, together with collection of stories, conversations, and songs.
In the summer of 2006, I made a second fieldwork trip, funded by a grant from the NSF/NEH Documenting Endangered Languages Program (DEL). I spent two months in Paroumba and surrounding villages, recording and transcribing many texts and songs galore, eliciting data from consultants, and evaluating the sociolinguistic situation.
In early 2008, I spent six more weeks in Senegal and two weeks in Guinea, where the Badiaranke originated and speakers are reportedly more numerous. During this time, I focused on eliciting data on modality-aspect interactions, as well as gathering more texts and observing dialectal differences between Senegalese and Guinean Badiaranke.
Semantics
My dissertation (along with related work) investigates the semantics of aspect, modality, and tense in Badiaranke. The dissertation is particularly concerned with the semantic overlap and interactions between these categories, in particular the role of modality in the semantics of aspect and the role of tense in the semantics of modality. My research on aspect-modality interactions was fueled by two patterns in Badiaranke: the use of the perfective to talk about present states but past events, and the use of imperfective aspect to express not only conventionally imperfective/aspectual semantics, such as habitual and progressive, but also concepts considered more modal than aspectual, including futurity, counterfactuality, and epistemic modality. The extension of the dissertation's coverage to encompass tense and its interaction with modality was motivated by a number of observations, including the importance of tense-marking in modal semantics in Badiaranke, despite the fact that tense-marking is often optional in the language, and the presence of two past tense markers in the language, whose complementary distribution falls out along modal dimensions. My analysis of tense in Badiaranke lends support to Iatridou's (2000) analysis of ''fake'' and true pasts in counterfactuals, while my analysis of Badiaranke aspect extends the modal analyses of progressive aspect, from Dowty (1977) to Portner (1998), to other types of aspect in Badiaranke and related languages.Syntax
In addition to my semantic work on Badiaranke, I also work on the syntax (and semantics/pragmatics) of Pulaar (Atlantic). My primary interest has been the syntax (and semantics/pragmatics) of Pulaar focus constructions and copular clauses; I have also worked on the syntax and semantics of Pulaar possessive pronouns. You can find some of my work on Pulaar on the Papers page.In future research, I plan to investigate the morphosyntax of relative clauses in Pulaar and Badiaranke, the syntax and semantics of TAM in Badiaranke, and the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of focus in Badiaranke.