Research

Nominalisation

Nominalisation – the creation of complex nouns – is a widespread phenomenon across languages. I am interested in the crosslinguistic variation in the size and structure of nominal and clausal layers in nominalised clauses, as well as constraints that shape how they are formed. I have argued that Khalkha Mongolian lacks a particular type of small nominalised clause – a gap that I further argue follows from a constraint predicted under an approach to syntactic derivation under the Williams Cycle.

Number

I am interested in the morphosyntax of number marking. In joint work with Seoyeon Jang, we investigate the reduplication of wh-items to signal plurality in questions in Khalkha Mongolian, Korean, and Turkish. We argue that crosslinguistic differences in wh-reduplication patterns arise from variation in the attachment site of a reduplicative morpheme. This work suggests that surface-similar number marking patterns may have distinct sources in syntax – an idea which I am further pursuing in Khalkha Mongolian and Kalmyk Oirat.

Case

A central question in generative syntax concerns the mechanisms by which case is assigned. I have argued that the exceptionally wide distribution of accusative case in Khalkha Mongolian – often resembling dependent case – can be accounted for under an Agree-based approach. In ongoing work, I am exploring how this approach can be extended to understand case marking phenomena in Kalmyk Oirat and Megrelian.

Dynamic contact

I am also interested in variation and change that arise in situations of language contact. In ongoing work with Wil Gonzales, Mohamed Hafiz, Mie Hiramoto, Nick Huang, and Jakob Leimgruber, we have documented and investigated various morphosyntactic phenomena in Singapore English (Singlish) using data from CoSEM, a corpus of Singlish text messages we co-developed. Our findings show that the ongoing development of Singlish is a dynamic process that continues to be shaped by locally spoken substrate languages and broader social trends in contemporary Singapore.