Department of Linguistics
University of California, Santa Cruz
1156 High St.
Santa Cruz, CA 95064 rkramer-at-ucsc-dot-edu
Research
I am a sixth-year Ph.D. student in the linguistics
department at UC Santa Cruz. My research centers on two languages: Amharic
and Ancient Egyptian, both members of the Afroasiatic language family. My current thesis research incorporates data from both languages
and investigates two aspects of the syntax-morphology interface: how syntactic cylicity affects morphological (post-syntactic)
cyclicity, and the relationship between syntactic and morphological agreement. My C.V. has
further information about my past and present research activities.
[The Amharic definite marker provides evidence that some morphological operations (like Local Dislocation) are
subject to the Phase Impenetrability Condition. This is a pre-publication version of the paper, and feedback is welcome.
Please contact me before distributing or citing.]
To appear.VSO and SVO word order in Middle Egyptian. In The Proceedings of the
35th Annual North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics, ed. C. Häberl. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press. 92-147.
[This paper contains an interlocking account of the dominant (VSO) and alternative (SVO) word orders in Middle Egyptian, as well as the agreement asymmetry between them
(rich agreement in SVO, no agreement in VSO). The analysis of the agreement asymmetry appeals to morphological agreement, and provides support for
the idea of cyclic spell-out by phase.]
2008. Virtual relative clauses in Middle Egyptian. In The Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society
(CLS 40). Volume 2. eds. N. Adams et al. 135-149. Chicago: CLS.
[The so-called 'virtual' relative clauses of Middle Egyptian display a number of unusual properties compared to other Middle Egyptian relative clauses.
These properties are accounted under for under a correlative analysis.]
[Many recent accounts of root and pattern morphology downplay or eliminate the role of the consonantal root
in word formation, but evidence from Coptic demonstrates that the root is essential. A more detailed version of the
paper is in Phonology at Santa Cruz 7, and available
here.]
Teaching, etc.
Fall 2008: Research assistant for Sandy Chung Winter 2008: Teaching assistant for 80C: Language, Society and Culture
