Evidentiality has been researched in detail in a handful Formosan languages, with the exception of Squliq Atayal. To investigate the presence of evidential markers and/or strategies in Atayal, I developed a novel translation task that prompts speakers to translate sentences based on the semantic parameters of evidentiality established in Aikhenvald (2004). I find evidence to suggest that the aspectual marker wal has evidential extensions that indicate both indirect and direct sources of evidence. Interestingly, I find that wal is felicitous with each semantic parameter except for non-visual sensory. I provide an analysis of wal that shows a conceptual overlap between indirect and direct evidentiality, and conclude that its distribution contradicts the conventional (in)direct dichotomy.
Converbs are a widespread linguistic phenomenon, yet there are relatively few structural accounts of them in the generative literature. To provide a preliminary syntactic account of converb constructions, I elicited data for the imperfective converb in Khalkha Mongolian (suffixed as -ж/ž) and the imperfect converb in Manchu (-me), and analyzed these constructions' argument structure and relations to the main verb clause. Looking at issues of subjecthood, valency, extraction, adjunction, and scope of negation, I argue that converbs project their own vPs which adjoin to a higher-positioned functional projection that is directly below the matrix TP. Dependent Case Theory is used to account for some of the case facts observed in these constructions.
For this project, I look at why fragment answers in response to subject wh- questions in English are in the accusative form (Q: Who saw the cat? A: Me), while the sentential responses are in the nominative form (Q: Who saw the cat? S: I saw the cat). I look at two competing theories of nonsententials, namely the Ellipsis Approach (Merchant 2004) and the approach of Direct Interpretation (Barton and Progovac 2005), and I provide a middle-ground approach by proposing that fragment DPs derive from a null vP. Utilizing Dependent Case Theory, I argue that fragment DPs construed as the internal argument are realized in dependent case for nominative-accusative languages, and that external argument fragment DPs would be found in their default case form, which is language-specific. Fragment answer data from English, Korean, and Serbian is used to provide cross-linguistic support for this null vP analysis and discussion of case.
A novel analysis of the case forms of pronominal fragment answers in response to subject wh- questions in English, Korean, and Serbian
Since 2021, I have been collaborating with speakers of Sibe, a dialect of Manchu to develop online documentation materials for the speaker community. These documentation materials include a Sibe-Mandarin-English dictionary with audio recordings, an introductory phrasebook, a video archive of authentic language material, and more. All of these resources can be found on Mini Buleku (lit. 'My Dictionary'), an online platform I coded and developed to make our resources available to the community of speakers in China and abroad.
From July 2022 to August 2023, I served as Documentation Manager of the HUC-JIR Jewish Language Project, where I led the organization's work in documenting endangered Jewish language varieties — primarily Judeo-Iranian and Jewish Neo-Aramaic. For both languages, I coordinated the filming, transcription/translation, and dissemination of over 10 authentic language sample videos. I also collaborated with the community of Jewish Neo-Aramaic speakers to lay the groundwork for an online recorded dictionary, as well as a speaker of Judeo-Arabic to produce an oral history in the language. Finally, in November 2022, I applied for a grant with the Wikimedia Foundation and was awarded approximately $50,000 to create and upload content in endangered Jewish languages to the various Wikimedia Projects, including Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia.
As a member of Harvard's fieldwork (WOLF) lab, I developed a program that creates LaTeX-ready numbered examples from unformatted text. Some features of the program are that it can: support different LaTeX packages (linguex and gb4e), generate glosses with(out) the original language's orthography, convert linguistic annotations into small caps, create sub-examples, clean up whitespaces, and more. This program is currently accessible through a notebook on Google Colab.