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Research

I study language use in interaction across cultures and the lifespan. This focus leads to interests in first language acquisition, pragmatics, and language documentation.

All of my research is based on my own fieldwork in the Amazon Basin, where I have spent over 26 months working with speakers of Ticuna (isolate; Peru, Brazil, Colombia) and other Indigenous languages, such as Máíhɨ̃ki (formerly known as Orejón; Tukanoan; Peru). Because these languages are endangered and underdescribed, I complement my core research on deixis and language development with studies of phonology, morphology, and syntax.

Child Language

  • Flibl: A tool to ease transfer between ELAN and FLEx [child language research software]. Under review. Joint work with Sophie Pierson (UT Austin), Sunny Ananthanarayan (University of Washington) and Claire Bowern (Yale).
  • 2023. What causes the asymmetry between index and open-hand pointing in L1 acquisition? Linguistic Society of America presentation with Alejandra Gonzalez (Cornell undergraduate student). Slides here.
  • 2023. Learning speaker- and addressee-centered demonstratives in Ticuna. Journal of Child Language 50(3) 632-661. Open access here.

Semantics & Pragmatics Research with Adults

Deixis

Other Topics

  • 2021. Countability in Ticuna. LIAMES: Línguas Indígenas Americanas 21: 1-20. Open access here.
  • 2018. Tenselessness and aspect in Cushillococha Ticuna. Manuscript available here.

Language Documentation & Description

  • With Sophie Pierson (UT Austin), Sunny Ananthanarayan (University of Washington) and Claire Bowern (Yale). under revision. Digital infrastructure and its impacts on language work: A case study of FieldWorks Language Explorer. Preprint here.
  • 2023. Tone, stress, and their interactions in Cushillococha Ticuna. Phonological Data & Analysis 5(5). Open access here.
  • 2022. With Karolin Obert. Differential place marking beyond place names: Evidence from two Amazonian languages. Glossa 7(1). Open access here.
  • 2021. Ticuna (tca) language documentation: A guide to materials in the California Language Archive. Language Documentation & Conservation 15: 153-189. Open access here.
  • 2017. Phonology and nominal morphology of Cushillococha Ticuna. Ph.D. dissertation prospectus, UC Berkeley. Available here, but mostly superceded by the Phonological Data & Analysis paper cited above.
  • 2017. Three speakers, four dialects: Documenting variation in an endangered Amazonian language. Language Documentation and Conservation SP13: 94-115. Open access here.
  • 2017. Assertive questions in Máíhɨ̃ki. Journal of Pragmatics 109: 121-136. Closed access, but final published version available here.
  • 2016. Esoteric morphology: vocable affixes in Máíhɨ̃ki shamanic song. Proceedings of CILLA VII. Open access here.
  • 2016. Meter without feet. Ph.D. qualifying paper, on metrics in a genre of traditional verbal art. MS available here.
  • 2014. Grammatical sketch of Northern Máíhɨ̃ki. MS available here; most accessible in combination with chh. 1-3 of Farmer (2015).

Archival Deposits [all open access]

  • Ticuna conversations. Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, UC Berkeley, SCL 2018-19, doi:10.7297/X2F769QD
    • Audio-video recordings of maximally informal conversation between adults.
    • Audio-video recordings of religious discourse by adults.
    • Audio-video recordings of 45 children aged 1;0 to 4;11.
  • Ticuna experiments. Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, UC Berkeley, SCL 2018-20, doi:10.7297/X29G5K03
    • Audio-video recordings of psycholinguistic experiments with adults.
  • Ticuna elicitation and texts. Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, UC Berkeley, SCL 2015-06, doi:10.7297/X29P2ZPJ
    • Audio-video recordings of elicitation interviews with adults.
    • Audio-video recordings of stories, landscape description interviews, and other primarily monologic texts.

 

  • Contributions to Materials of the Berkeley Máíhɨ̃ki Project, Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, UC Berkeley, SCL 2013-02, doi:10.7297/X2DR2SGD
    • Several hundred audio recordings of stories, landscape descriptions, oral history/autobiography and other primarily monologic texts.
    • ~250 time-aligned text transcripts.

Community Materials

Historical Linguistics & Other Past Lives

  • My BA thesis on classification and reconstruction in Western Tukanoan is here.
  • Previously, I worked as a research assistant in Claire Bowern’s Pama-Nyungan Languages Lab at Yale, where I contributed to the Grambank database as a coder. My authorships related to this work include:
    • “Noun classes” in the Oxford Guide to Australian Languages (in press). Preprint available here; the final published version is available closed access here.
    • Author 85 of 105 on the following paper: 2023. Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss. Science Advances 9(16). Open access here.
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