226 South College
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Amherst MA 01003
| Welcome
I am a fourth-year graduate student in the PhD program in linguistics at UMass - Amherst. My research interests are in syntax, semantics and morphology, especially in areas where the three come together. My work draws primarily from English and Nez Perce. Some of my favorite research topics are non-specificity, argument structure and case-marking; I have also done some work on null arguments.
Current research topics: futures; semantics of antipassive and the cross-linguistic encoding of property-type objects; morphosemantics of Nez Perce modals; markers of space and time on the Nez Perce verb; Persian "indefinite determiners"; ergative case
In the spring of 2007 I co-organized the annual ECO5 workshop, which has a rudimentary website here.
| Contact info
Department of Linguistics
226 South College
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Amherst MA 01003
| Downloadable papers & handouts
| Work in progress
I analyze inflection for space in the tense-aspect system of Nez Perce. Space inflection appears between aspect and tense and locates events with respect to the utterance situation.
Property-type objects and modal embedding [2007] (PDF)
I argue for a unified semantics for non-specific objects. The two central features of the analysis are property-type object positions and modal embedding; I argue that non-specific (property-type) objects combine with verbs with the help of a head ANTIP, which provides existential closure over property-type objects in the scope of a modal operator. The modal character of this head allows us to unify non-specificity effects across intensional and extensional verbs, in keeping with empirical evidence from Nez Perce, Hindi and Inuit that suggests a unified analysis.
The asymmetry of argument structure: evidence from coercion [2007] (PDF)
This paper brings psycholinguistic evidence to bear on the question of how far-reaching verbal underspecification must be. Are verb roots capable of introducing theme arguments, or must this task fall to functional heads? New experimental evidence comes from causativization and the interpretation of known intransitives used transitively. In assigning grammatical structure to transitive sentences containing intransitive verbs (e.g. laugh, arrive), subjects are more likely to build causative structures if the verb is unaccusative than if it is unergative. I argue that this finding follows naturally from an account where unaccusatives and unergatives differ in root type: unaccusative roots introduce arguments, whereas unergative roots do not. The finding is not predicted on a theory where all argument introduction is factored out in functional structure. Such results provide a bound on how underspecified verbal roots can be: theme arguments must remain root arguments, whatever else is factored out.
Antipassive and indefinite objects in Nez Perce [2007] (PDF)
I provide an analysis of non-specific objects and canonical indefinite objects in Nez Perce, arguing that the former should be treated as property-type indefinites and the latter as quantificational indefinites. I argue on the basis of cross-linguistic comparison and the semantics of the antipassive operator for a covert antipassive morpheme in Nez Perce.
The origin and content of expletives: evidence from "selection" [2006] (PDF)
I argue that English there is a low expletive generated in the specifier of a verbalizing head v. Low origin is motivated by a tightly local agreement relation between the expletive and its DP associate. The analysis accounts for why not all verbs, and indeed not all unaccusatives, may cooccur with there, and provides a solution for a number of problems noted in the literature regarding expletives plus raising verbs, e.g. *There is there a man in the room, *There seemed to disappear a book from the library.
Ergative case and the transitive subject: a view from Nez Perce [2007] ( PDF )
The three-way case system of Nez Perce has been claimed to be optional in transitive clauses: either subject and object both mark case, or both arguments remain caseless. Based on semantic and syntactic diagnostics, I propose that caseless clauses in Nez Perce bifurcate into two distinct syntactic structures: an antipassive construction, in which the nominal is interpreted as a property, and an extended reflexive construction, in which the nominal is blocked from agreement due to an anaphor agreement effect. The task is to explain why each of these constructions is interpreted as morphologically caseless. I provide evidence that a successful theory of Nez Perce case must be based firmly on morphology interpretation, not on an abstract Case theory concerned with licensing. Finally, I argue that the Nez Perce data discussed here underline the need for a semantic approach to typological generalization.
Pro-drop, topic-drop and the functional lexicon: a constructional account of null arguments [2005] ( PDF )
I argue that pro-drop and topic-drop are the same thing, & that a view of language variation exclusively tied to lexical items of a functional variety can be fruitfully expanded to include functional items larger than words -- the constructions of pro-drop.