About me
I am originally from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, a city in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. I received a BA (honours) and an MA from the Linguistics Department at the University of Calgary. My research from my time in Calgary deals mainly with the phonology of Blackfoot, an endangered Algonquian language spoken in southern Alberta and north-western Montana. It combines description and field research with formal phonological theory, a theme which continues to be present in my research. My work on Blackfoot is available here.
I recently completed a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. My dissertation concerns the prosodic system of Conamara (Connemara) Irish, an endangered language spoken along the west coast of Ireland. It investigates the ways in which information about syntactic structure are preserved in the prosody, and is based on original fieldwork with native speakers of this language. A short summary of my dissertation can be found below. The complete manuscript can be found here.
In January, 2012, I will take up a two-year SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship which I will hold in the Linguistics Department at McGill University in Montréal, Canada, in collaboration with the McGill Prosody Lab. I will use this opportunity to pursue fieldwork and experimental work on Conamara Irish, with a particular focus on locating the cues to prosodic boundaries, and on how the relative strength of these boundaries is used in Irish to preserve information about the degree of syntactic embedding.
Here is a description of my dissertation, my research interests, and some of my current and recent projects:
Dissertation, Syntax-Prosody Interactions in Irish
My dissertation is an empirical and theoretical investigation of sentence prosody in Irish, with a focus on the Conamara (Connemara) dialect. Through the analysis of the pitch contours of sentences with varying syntactic structures, I argue that the distribution of pitch accents in Conamara Irish provide direct information about the prosodic organization of sentences. More specifically, I show that one of these pitch accents, an L-H rise, serves as an indicator for recursive prosodic structure, where prosodic categories of the same type are contained within each other. I argue that the presence of recursion in prosodic structure derives from a family of correspondence constraints ('Match') which call for a one-to-one correspondence between syntactic and prosodic constituents, as under Match Theory (Selkirk 2009, 2011). This suggests that prosodic structure provides more information about syntactic constituency than previously believed, including information about the embedding of syntactic constituents.
In further support of this theory of the syntax-prosody interface, my dissertation also investigates instances where syntactic and prosodic constituents do not match up one-to-one. I show that these deviations can be explained by the assumption that Match constraints are violable, as in an OT framework, and that prosodic well-formedness constraints may be satisfied in preference to Match constraints, resulting in non-isomorphic structures. I further discuss patterns of variation found within and between speakers, and propose that a model assuming weighted rather than ranked constraints, as in Harmonic Grammar, provides the best account of the observed patterns.
Finally, I discuss pronoun postposing, a process pervasive across Irish dialects in which object pronouns may be displaced from canonical object position under certain circumstances. Following previous work on this topic, I propose a prosodic account of this process using the framework and constraints developed in the earlier part of the thesis, along with the added proposal that constraints on the linearization of syntactic structure are violable and may interact with both Match constraints and prosodic well-formedness constraints, and that phonological Spell-Out is cyclic and phase-based. I show that the observed patterns, including its variable nature, are accounted for under the proposed theoretical framework developed to account for other aspects of the prosodic system of Conamara Irish.
General interests:
- Prosody: I am interested in prosody both at the sentence level and at the word level, and particularly, in understanding how competing factors from different parts of the grammar combine to determine prosodic phrasing. I am particularly interested by the range of issues presented by the syntax-prosody interface, which deals with the mapping between syntactic structure and prosodic phrasing. These questions form the basis of my dissertation (see above).
- Irish prosody: My dissertation work on Irish looks at sentence prosody in this language both empirically and theoretically (some of my recent work is available here). I am particularly interested in the problem of pronoun postposing, where weak object pronouns in certain syntactic environments are displaced from canonical object position and appear farther to the right than expected. I am currently working on a prosodic account of this phenomenon in collaboration with linguists at UC Santa Cruz. In addition, I am conducting field research on prosody with native speakers of Conamara Irish (both in Boston and Ireland), and am working toward a basic understanding of the phonetics and phonology of sentence prosody in the language.
- Fieldwork: I am pursuing field research on sentence prosody in Irish: some of the results of this research may be found in my dissertation, and I have plans to pursue further field research on Irish as part of a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship. I am currently focusing on Conamara Irish, and I have worked with native speakers in Boston and in Galway County in western Ireland.
I also have experience working on First Nations languages of Canada. During my time at the University of Calgary, I had the opportunity to pursue work on Blackfoot, the results of which are reported in my MA thesis. Further, in the summer of 2008, I participated in a documentation project on Kwak'wala, a First Nations language spoken on and around Vancouver Island, Canada. I am not currently involved with any projects concerning First Nations languages, but I hope to return to this work in the near future.
- Harmonic Serialism: I am also interested in the consequences of assigning prosodic structure serially under the theoretical framework of Harmonic Serialism, a derivational, but non-cyclic, variant of OT. My recent work in this area has focused on opaque stress-epenthesis interactions and the serial assignment of syllable structure (available here), and I am interested in how this theory can make use of the combination of constraint interaction and serialism to account for various types of opacity, a traditionally problematic area for OT.