Clicks are far too often ignored or misunderstood in phonology. I'm working to fix that. These segments raise a lot of interesting questions, many of which are still unanswered. My current research revolves around the phonological representation of the lingual airstream mechanism used to produce clicks, and how it relates to the normal pulmonic airstream used in most other speech sounds.
Come see me at the Annual Conference in African Linguistics! (ACAL 39) [abstract]
Long-distance consonant assimilaton/dissimilation processes have a different constellation of properties than their adjacency-based counterparts. Surface correspondence has been a valuable tool for explaining long-distance consonant assimilation. I'm exploring how it might handle long-distance dissimilation as well, using data from the Nguni languages (Zulu, Xhosa, Swati, Ndebele).
Stay tuned for a draft of a paper on this issue!
I'm investigating the morphosyntax of gender/noun class marking and agreement. What's the morpho-syntactic relationship between classes and nominal roots? Are Gender and Noun Class just different implementations of a single syntactic mechanism? How does that mechanism work? Is it universal? (I don't really know yet.) I'm pursuing these questions in Defaka, a language that used to have Bantu-style noun classes, and now seems to have a sex-based gender system.
What kind of syntactic goings-on happen in nominal structures like DPs? Work on Romance and Germanic languages suggests complex structures and movements; what do other languages have to say about this? How do nouns interact with quantifiers, classifiers, and gender marking? I'm particularly interested in DPs in Bantu languages (isiZulu, isiXhosa, and seSotho) and Sino-Tibetan languages (Tibetan & Chinese).
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