Summer plans
May 20--June 14 I will be in New Zealand, working on Polynesian languages. June 17-21 I will be in Chicago directing Heritage Language Institute. June 27--July 20 I will be in French Polynesia.
General
My work is at the intersection of theoretical syntax and study of cross-linguistic variation in sentence structure. I am interested in the ways linguistic theory can be used as a roadmap for understanding how people process language and for obtaining meaningful results that feed back into theory. Language-wise, I specialize in Austronesian and languages of the Caucasus. I also have a particular interest in heritage languages which are strikingly similar to each other; it is important to understand why they share so many grammatical similarities with each other. In terms of linguistic phenomena, I am particularly interested in long-distance dependencies, case assignment, and control/raising.
