Academic Writing
Linguistic research and theory
My academic work explores grammatical diversity, syntactic change, and the structure of language across different typologies.
2023
Word classes
Chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Australian Languages
This chapter is an overview of word classes within Australian Aboriginal languages, covering the major classes of nominals and verbs (including the variation pertaining to which other classes may be considered beneath those umbrellas) as well as pro-words, determiners, conjunctions, adverbs, and negators. The chapter also addresses words that straddle multiple classes and derivation between classes. Insofar as there are conclusions to be drawn about word classes across all Australian Aboriginal languages, we ultimately find enormous diversity regarding which classes may be considered truly distinct (nouns and adjectives, light verbs, and auxiliaries, etc.), by what means such classes may be distinguished (morphology, syntactic position, semantic denotation, etc.), and even how a particular word class behaves cross-linguistically (whether verbs are an open or closed class). These questions are often ambiguous within languages as well, giving rise to plenty of disagreement in the literature, which is also addressed in this overview.
Read Chapter →2020
The Structural Grammaticalization of the Biblical Hebrew Ethical Dative
Yale Undergraduate Research Journal
This paper offers a structural analysis of the evolution of a grammatical phenomenon in Biblical Hebrew known as the Ethical Dative (ED). My analysis is rooted in the grammaticalization chain proposed by Talmy Givón wherein the Ethical Dative evolves incrementally from other dative forms, accounting for its lopsided distribution across the Bible. 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, allowing us to account for Givón’s progression through the gradual reduction of merge-operations and feature-valuation at that node. My analysis bolsters the notion that the uneven distribution of EDs is indicative of diachronic evolution and not synchronic variation. Moreover, this paper enhances our understanding of a potential grammatical fingerprint within the Hebrew Bible that may aid in discerning authors, time periods, and the broader history of the Bible’s composition and redaction.
Read Article →2020
On African American Language and Grammatical Diversity in 2020
Yale Grammatical Diversity Project
This essay is my attempt to put the work of the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project in the current and ongoing American context of racist violence/discrimination and the disregard for Black bodies, voices, and lives. Given that there is no ideologically neutral description of language (nor, necessarily, should there be), I am assigning to the YGDP's work the overt and explicit ideological agenda of uplifting and legitimizing marginalized speech communities and their languages, specifically African Americans and African American Language. This essay addresses and reiterates a number of empirical points taken up on various YGDP phenomena pages and research elsewhere regarding the systematicity, coherence, and internal diversity of African American Language, and it also addresses the acute and material consequences of not dispelling certain misconceptions about marginalized dialects and their speakers. Though frequently implied throughout the contemporary linguistic literature, I feel it is urgent to resoundingly and repeatedly bridge the gap between research and advocacy through both statements of resolution like this one and direct action, which I take up further later on. I hope that the reader will feel armed with new insight pertaining to the facts and significance of linguistic diversity and discrimination and that we at the YGDP may be held accountable to the level of advocacy which our work can and must attain.
Read Essay →2020
You do you
Yale Grammatical Diversity Project
Post documenting an interesting grammatical microvariant in North American English
Read Posts →2020
And God Said: Let There Be [a Structural Approach to Syntactic Diachrony in the Hebrew Bible]
Undergraduate Thesis, Yale University
This thesis takes a structural-syntactic approach to the task of linguistically dating Biblical texts. More specifically, I take up three grammaticalization progressions/chains described quantitatively and cognitively in three papers by Talmy Givón and demonstrate how each of these progressions can be explained as a process of (crucially, unidirectional) structural syntactic evolution, allowing us to better position texts along a diachronic continuum with respect to the phenomena under discussion. These phenomena are: (1) The loss of complement-clause constructions built around v-hine and their usurpation by the subordinator asher, (2) the gradual shift of Biblical Hebrew word order from preferring VSO to preferring SVO, and (3) the emergence of an Ethical Dative from other grammatical progenitors. In each case, I find that the progression can be attributed to principles of Economy or Reduction which we know to operate unidirectionally in historical syntax. Along the way, I propose new syntactic derivations for the v-hine construction, the VOS clause and the Ethical Dative, shedding light on other parallel phenomena cross linguistically. Ultimately, this work serves as another arrow in the quiver of Biblical historians who believe that Hebrew Bible texts exist along a diachronic continuum and that their chronological position is reflected in their language.
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