Welcome!

Hello, my name is Matthew Tucker, and I am a second-year graduate student in linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Below are highlights and announcements of what I'm currently up to. For more information, click on any of the links above.

Qualifying Paper I

Posted 30 May 2009

I recently defended my first qualifying paper, which I wrote under the direction of Junko Ito. The paper is titled "The Root-and-Prosody Approach to Arabic Verbs" and is a detailed empirical examination of the derivational verbal system of Iraqi Arabic. In it, I propose a new Optimality-Theoretic analysis of root-and-pattern morphologies which derives all templatic effects from prosodic markedness constraints. The paper is available in the Papers section. Comments are most definitely appreciated!