Fieldwork
Kalmyk Oirat
Since 2022, I have been working with speakers of the Kalmyk language, a variety of the Oirat language. Kalmyk is spoken by an aging minority of ethnic Kalmyks in the Republic of Kalmykia, Russia, where it is also an official language, and in diasporic communities in the US and Europe. I am interested in investigating the structures of (nominalised) embedded clauses, the relationship between case and agreement, and the morphosyntax of the nominal domain in Kalmyk.
I also have an ongoing community-focused project with my collaborators, Ghilyana Dordzhieva and Darina Gedeeva, aimed at revitalising the Kalmyk language within the Kalmyk-American diaspora. We have created a Living Dictionary for Kalmyk and taught online lessons on conversational Kalmyk. Our project was also supported and featured by Wikitongues.
Khalkha Mongolian
Since 2020, I have been working with speakers of Khalkha Mongolian, the standardised variety of Mongolian spoken in Mongolia. My current dissertation research focuses on morphosyntactic properties of (nominalised) embedded clauses in Khalkha, and the insights they provide as to the interactions between nominal and clausal structure, the relationship between case and agreement, and differential subject marking.
