I am a third year graduate student in the linguistics department at UMass, Amherst.
My interestes are in syntax, semantics, and morphology, and their
interfaces. I am also interested in---the formal analysis as well as
the empirical description of---the Iranian languages, and much of my
work so far has drawn data from Modern Farsi (Persian).
My curriculum vitae may be viewed here here in html, or downloaded here in pdf.
Current projects
The
syntax of finite clausal subjects and complements, particularly in
non-rigid head final languages; complex
predicates; modality, and its interactions with lexical and veiewpoint aspect, and with
tense; (in)definiteness and specificity in Persian. Recently, in collaboration with Amy Rose Deal,
I have begun an investigation of the semantics of the Persian
indefinite morpheme -i.
Dari (also known as Zartoshti, Gabri), Northwestern Iranian (the Dari Language Project
is a research organization I cofounded (with Maziar Toosarvandani) to help support this research);
Shughni (Pamir).
Links related to the UMass department, linguistics
departments in which I have studied previously, and my favorite nonlinguistic discipline.
Manuscripts
2007. An antisymmetric approach to Persian clausal complements.
[UMass syntax generals paper 1]
The
clause-final position of clausal complements in Persian raises
challenges for existing views of the language as underlyingly verb
final. I show that these problems are avoided, and several additional
facts derived, if the language is analysed instead as being
underlyingly head initial, within an
antisymmetric framework of the type originally developed in Kayne
(1994).
2005. Persian complex predicates: towards a nonderivational approach.
Oxford MPhil thesis.