past research projects
Selectivity and Voicing Assimilation
This project proposes a novel theory of voicing assimilation and neutralization -- Selectivity -- which can account for both the patterns of heterosyllabic assimilation and tautosyllabic assimilation. This was research for my first qualifying paper; my advisors are Paul de Lacy, Alan Prince, and Bruce Tesar.
Agentive Synthetic compounds
Work on agentive synthetic compounds, such as 'truckdriver' and 'scarecrow', developed into my Master's thesis (advisor: Ljiljana Progovac). I gave a unified anlalysis for these two types of compounds which can account for the cross-linguistic variation of their form. (E.g., in languages like English, German, Finnish, etc. the form is 'truckdriver', while in languages like Spanish, French, etc., the form is 'scarecrow'. It turns out that there is a direct correlation between the compound word order and word order in the VP, for both OV and VO languages).
Materials on these and other topics can be found on my handouts page or my papers page.
