My main research interests are in formal semantics and morpho-syntax. Most of my work focuses on exploring topics in these subareas in Mvskoke (Creek) and Koasati. Here are a few of my current projects.
Graded past tense in Mvskoke and Koasati
Building off of fieldwork from Summers 2017-2019, I have an ongoing project exploring the semantics of the graded past tense system in both Mvskoke and Koasati. Recently this project has focused more on the Mvskoke tenses and on their interaction with evidentiality. My second generals paper develops a semantic account of this interaction and proposes a semantics for the past tense intervals each tense denotes.
Optional case marking in Mvskoke
My first generals paper presents a formal syntactic analysis of optional subject and object case-marking in Mvskoke. In this paper, I provide novel data from fieldwork showing that case is not entirely optional, but that second objects always get case marked and large nominals also always get case marked. I develop a Dependent Case analysis that reduces optionality to structural ambiguity.)
Verbal suppletion in Mvskoke
Mvskoke has an intricate system for marking plurality of subjects and objects. Many verbs participate in number-conditioned suppletion. This manuscript argues that verbal suppletion in Mvskoke consists of different phonological forms of one abstract root conditioned by local syntactic features.