Research Interests

My research focuses on morphosyntax, especially in the Mayan languages. Many people are not aware that Mayan is still spoken, but in fact, there are about thirty distinct Mayan languages spoken today by over 4 million people in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize.

I am particularly interested in Tzotzil, a language spoken in Chiapas, Mexico. I have also had the opportunity to work on Tz'utujil and K'ichee' with speakers living in the States. My approach is to try to reach a deeper understanding of these languages by approaching them from a cross-Mayan and cross-linguistic perspective.

In recent work, I have explored the idea that voice in Tzotzil and other Mayan languages is structured by a system of abstract obviation, much like that expressed in the morphosyntax of languages of the Algonquian family. I am continuing to develop this research in the context of a richer set of assumptions about case and agreement. Other morphosyntactic problems that I have worked on in Tzotzil include topic and focus, WH movement and pied piping, and the syntax of auxiliaries.

I am also interested in the role of prominence hierarchies in morphosyntax, and in how the effects of such hierarchies can be formally integrated into linguistic description. This was originally sparked by the study of voice in Tzotzil, but led to broader typological work on voice and differential case marking. The work explored ways that generalizations originally discovered by typologists about differential case marking could be expressed in Optimality Theory using harmonic alignment and constraint ranking.