about me

I am a graduate student in the Linguistics Department at University of California, San Diego. As an undergrad, I studied English Linguistics, German, and International Relations at Arizona State University. I was born and raised in Iowa. Like most linguists, I have enjoyed figuring out how languages work for as long as I can remember. Now is an exciting time to be a linguist, as we are social scientists working at the intersection of the fields of cognitive science, computer science, and anthropology, among others.

Here are a few links you might find helpful: My advisor is Grant Goodall. I am affiliated with the Experimental Syntax lab, the Multimodal Language Development lab, the Field Research lab, the Evolution of Language reading group, and the Sign Language reading group at UCSD. My undergraduate advisor at ASU was Elly van Gelderen.

research interests

Very generally, I'm a morphologist interested in language change. This feeds naturally into the following topics:

· the range of forms/processes available for encoding grammatical functions (the typology of morphosyntax)

· the interaction of syntax and morphology as languages change over time (cycles of grammaticalization and renewal)

· the emergence of morphological structure in new languages (particularly new sign languages)

· the nature of the relationships that exist among words in the lexicon (as in word-based morphology)

· the role of generalization in language use and acquisition (as in construction grammar)