past research projects
|| research interests || current research || past projects ||
voicing assimilation, heterosyllabic and tautosyllabic
In this project, I developed a novel theory of voicing assimilation and neutralization -- which I called Selectivity -- that can account for both the patterns of heterosyllabic and tautosyllabic voicing assimilation. This was research for my first qualifying paper; my advisors were 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. For example, in languages like English, German, Finnish, etc. the form of agentive synthetic compounds is 'truckdriver' (O-V-er), while in languages like Spanish, French, etc., their form is 'scarecrow' (V-O).
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. The generalization is that the verb and object in agentive synthetic compounds without an overt affix (as in Spanish) always occur in their VP order.
Materials on these and other topics can be found on my handouts page or my papers page.
