kevin mullin

I’m a second-year PhD student in linguistics at UMass-Amherst.

My interests are in phonetics, phonology, morphology, historical linguistics, and language description & documentation.  I’m fascinated by American languages (esp. Athabascan, Salish, Wakashan, Tanoan) as well as Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian languages.  I’m also interested in dictionary design of morphologically complex languages.

During the academic year 2008-2009, I looked at lexical stress and retracted tongue root harmony.

More recently, I’ve been working as a research assistant for John McCarthy and Joe Pater’s NSF grant Investigations in Optimality Theory: Typology, Learning, and Modeling this past summer of 2009 — looking at faithfulness to stress, reduplication in harmonic serialism, and modeling phonologization via artificial learning.