Research Interests

~language acquisition and language change
~typology and universals
~theoretical syntax and morphosyntax

Recent Projects  please see papers section for available pdfs

Learning biases and typological universals of (morpho)syntax
My dissertation project investigates the extent to which learning biases offer a possible explanation for typological universals in syntax and morphosyntax. The project uses a novel artificial language learning paradigm.
[ABSTRACT]

Clitic Doubling in Spoken French
This project investigates the evolving status of the Spoken French clitic system. Evidence from the use and prosody of clitic doubling constructions as well as other distributional and phonological features of the clitic suggest a complex problem of category assignment for the learner.
[ABSTRACT]

Old French V2 and clitic-second
This project developes an OT analysis of word order patters found in OF. Specifically it focusing on the effects of V2 and clitic-second requirements on possible word orders found in the 12th century. I treat these requirements as constraints on feature alignment  following (Legendre 2000).
[ABSTRACT]

Acquisition of French subject clitics & agreement morphology
I am currently involved in Prof. Géraldine Legendre's NSF-funded project to study how French children learn subject pronouns and other markers of agreement morphology.
[ABSTRACT]