Linguistics · Academic Writing

Here are some publications:


2023Chapter

Word classes

Oxford Handbook of Australian Languages

An overview of word classes within Australian Aboriginal languages, covering the major classes of nominals and verbs as well as pro-words, determiners, conjunctions, adverbs, and negators. Insofar as there are conclusions to be drawn across all Australian Aboriginal languages, we ultimately find enormous diversity — regarding which classes may be considered truly distinct, by what means such classes may be distinguished, and even how a particular word class behaves cross-linguistically.

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2020Article

The structural grammaticalization of the Biblical Hebrew ethical dative

Yale Undergraduate Research Journal

A structural analysis of the evolution of the Ethical Dative (ED) in Biblical Hebrew, rooted in the grammaticalization chain proposed by Talmy Givón. Via its similarity to the Personal Dative in Appalachian English, I propose a derivation for the ED whose locus is the specifier of a high Applicative Phrase — bolstering the notion that the uneven distribution of EDs is indicative of diachronic evolution, not synchronic variation.

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2020Essay

On African American Language and grammatical diversity in 2020

Yale Grammatical Diversity Project

An attempt to put the work of the YGDP in the current and ongoing American context of racist violence and discrimination. This essay addresses the systematicity, coherence, and internal diversity of African American Language, and the acute, material consequences of failing to dispel misconceptions about marginalized dialects and their speakers — bridging the gap between research and advocacy.

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2020Post

You do you

Yale Grammatical Diversity Project

Documenting an interesting grammatical microvariant in North American English.

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2020Thesis

And God said: let there be [a structural approach to syntactic diachrony in the Hebrew Bible]

Undergraduate Thesis, Yale University

A structural-syntactic approach to linguistically dating Biblical texts. I take up three grammaticalization progressions described by Talmy Givón — the loss of v-hine complement clauses, the VSO→SVO word-order shift, and the emergence of the Ethical Dative — and show each can be explained as unidirectional structural syntactic evolution, positioning texts along a diachronic continuum. Another arrow in the quiver of Biblical historians.

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