I'm an assistant professor in the Program in Linguistics and Cognitive Science in the Department of Anthropology at the University at Albany, SUNY. My primary interests are theoretical syntax, prosody, and the interface between them. I work with data from Polynesian, Mayan, and Otomanguean languages, collected in situ and in diaspora communities.

New Papers

• 8/21 Syntactic ergativity as a processing-based constraint against crossed dependencies
• 7/21 The use of prosody as a diagnostic fo syntactic structure: the case of verb-initial word order

News

• Grammy Museum Foundation Grant awarded "Exploring the Links Between Tone Language Use, Pitch Discrimination, and Musical Emotion Perception"
• New book Polynesian Syntax and its Interfaces

​Up-Goer Five Challenge: My work in the 10,000 most frequently occurring words

​​​Humans have a beautiful way of talking. When people talk, they take word bits and build big words out of them. Then they take those big words and put them into groups. I study how these word groups fit together and how people talk out different word groups with different songs and different beats. I try to figure out what the music of different word groups tells us about how people build them. I work on the word bits, the word groups, and the music of word groups spoken by people who are more or less ignored in papers and books about how humans talk. The people who I work with live far away from me, some live close to the sky and others live surrounded by big water. I love to visit different people to learn about how they talk and how the way they build and speak out their word groups is the same and different from other people all over the world.