My review article, “The deictic content of demonstratives,” was published in Language & Linguistics Compass. The abstract reads as follows: What do demonstratives, like this/that and here/there, encode about their referents? The traditional answer argues that the deictic content of demonstratives is mostly about distance from the speaker – that proximals like this encode that the […]

I have been awarded an NSF-NEH Dynamic Language Infrastructure/Documenting Endangered Languages fellowship. This will support me to complete my academic reference grammar of Ticuna, in English, and begin work on a reference/pedagogical grammar designed for Ticuna-speaking educators, in Spanish. The project will run from 2024-2026.

In joint work with Sunny Ananthanarayan (U Washington), Sophie Pierson (UT Austin), and Claire Bowern (Yale), I’ve released Flibl, a new software tool that improves import/export of texts between ELAN and the database software FieldWorks Language Explorer or FLEx. Visit our OSF repository to download the tool, or read our manuscript about it here (under […]

On November 30 I gave a colloquium talk at Cornell. It was based on a manuscript under review titled “Anaphoric demonstratives occur with fewer and different pointing gestures than exophoric demonstratives.” The manuscript abstract reads: This study investigates the co-organization of place-referring demonstratives (e.g. here/there) and pointing gestures by speakers of Ticuna. Ticuna is an […]

I delivered a talk at the Colóquio Internacional Amazónicas IX, an biennial conference on Amazonian languages, on requests and directives issued to children in Ticuna. Access the talk slides here.

My article ‘Tone, stress and their interactions in Cushillococha Ticuna’ was accepted for publication at Phonological Data & Analysis. The article abstract reads: Ticuna (ISO: tca; Peru, Colombia, Brazil) displays a larger tone inventory – five level tones – than any other Indigenous American language outside Oto-Manguean. Based on recent fieldwork, this article argues that, in […]

As part of a team with Claire Bowern (Yale) and students Sunny Ananthanarayan (Yale) and Sophie Pierson (UT Austin), I’m authoring two talks at the 2023 online meeting of the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas this Jan. 20-22. On Jan. 20, Sophie will present our first talk, “Where FLEx falls […]

At the Linguistic Society of America meeting in Denver, I gave a presentation titled “What causes the asymmetry between index and open-hand pointing in L1 acquisition?”. I was pleased to co-deliver this talk with my undergraduate student Alejandra González (Cornell). The abstract for this talk reads: For Western children, index-finger (IX) pointing gestures predict many […]

My article “Learning speaker- and addressee-centered demonstratives in Ticuna” was published at Journal of Child Language. The article abstract reads: This study investigated the acquisition of demonstratives (e.g., this/that, here/there) by 45 children (1;0 – 4;11) learning Ticuna, an Indigenous Amazonian language with an unusually complex demonstrative system. I analyzed 89 10-minute samples from video […]

With Karolin Obert (UT Austin), I coauthored a paper titled “Differential place marking beyond place names: Evidence from two Amazonian languages.” The article has been accepted at the open-access journal Glossa. The abstract reads: Not all spatial adjuncts behave alike. In some languages, certain spatial adjuncts display different marking or different combinatorial possibilities than others. Recent […]