Welcome
I am a Research Fellow at the Research Institute for Linguistics at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and a Depertment Associate at the Department of Linguistics at Harvard. My research interests lie at the intersection of syntax and phonology.
I am particularly interested in how prosody interacts with sentence structure, and how information structure is reflected in syntax and prosody. Here are some of the questions that drive my research:
- Are information-structural notions such as 'focus' directly reflected in syntax?
- What are the similarities/differences between the syntactic and prosodic properties of wh-phrases and narrow foci?
- Are syntactic structures 'shipped to' phonology after they are assembled, or is building of syntactic structures constrained by phonological requirements?
In my dissertation, I investigated these topics in Georgian, a Kartvelian language spoken in the Caucasus.
I am also interested in the phonetics and phonology of stress and prosodic prominence. I have worked on the properties of stress in the Malyja Aŭciuki (Малыя Аўцюкі) dialect of Belarusian, in which the pretonic syllable developed unusual prominence, and in Georgian, which has notoriously elusive stress.
My current projects focus on prosody and its interaction with syntax in Iron Ossetic (Iranian) and Udmurt (Uralic).
You can find a copy of my CV here, and you can get in touch with me at borise[at]fas[dot]harvard[dot]edu
Last updated: November 18th, 2020