My Career (briefly)
- 2023-2024: Fellowship with the Dynamic Language Infrastructure: Documenting Endangered Languages program under the National Endowment for the Humanities (also, a concurrent Visiting Scholar appointment at Reed College). This fellowship was focused on lemmatizing Nishnaabemwin texts using a parser, and making the resulting analyses available on the Nishnaabemwin Online Dictionary and in Alan Ojiig Corbiere’s forthcoming book M’Chigeeng Dbaajmowinan.
- 2019-2023: Quality Assurance linguist for Lionbridge/Telus AI (intermittently)
- 2018-2022: Visiting Scholar at the University of Arizona.
- 2017-2018: Lecturer at Yale (technically also a concurrent Visiting Scholar appointment at the University of Arizona.
- 2015-2017: Post-doc at the University of Alberta, where I developed the first version of the parser used above.
- 2010-2015: PhD student at UCLA (2010-2015) under Bruce Hayes and Kie Zuraw.
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Research Description
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My research program fits within the Kiparskian paradigm: I seek to explain (at least some of) diachronic change through the architecture of synchronic grammar. My primary focus has been on the aftermath of rhythmic syncope, where an unremarkable sound change (the reduction and loss of unstressed syllables from iterative feet) triggers far-reaching restructuring in the morphophonological grammar. Richard Rhodes’ lexicographic work (published in 1985) provides clear evidence of rapid restructuring in Nishnaabemwin. My work has expanded the descriptive picture with comprehensive field data and opened the way to a formal language theoretic explanation for the phonological catastrophe. See especially my paper in Phonology and my work with Sophie Hao.
There are other cases of rhythmic syncope and restructuring out there. I am particularly interested in Early Irish and Eastern Slavic, where the historical literature discusses tumultuous ‘periods of trial and error’ (to borrow a phrase from Isacenko’s 1970 description of Eastern Slavic) beginning immediately after the onset of rhythmic syncope. Elliott Lash and I wrote a paper (accepted to Phonological Data and Analysis) showing a method that estimates the volume of loan words through time; this can plausibly be extrapolated to estimating the pace of language change. When applied to Irish, we find that very few loans likely entered during the rhythmic syncope period, which is commensurate with rhythmic syncope having quickly died out. I would like to gain a better grasp of the data in Irish and East Slavic sometime in this lifetime (or Mojeno Trinitario, Southern Pomo, Tonkawa, Macushi, Maga Rukai, etc.). If you want to team up, reach out!
Building on my penchant for applying primary field data to theoretical questions, I did an acoustic study looking for correlates of stress in Gujarati, about which some theoretical arguments on sonority-driven stress had been made. My paper in Phonological Data and Analysis found no empirical support for the theoretical claims.
Other Things
When I am not being an academic, I sometimes help film-makers and video game studios create fictional languages (see the first season of the Syfy show Killjoys, and Copper Age). True extra-curricular interests include being Daddy to my adored son, camping, skiing, board games, park picnics, and living so as not to worsen the climate crisis.