About Me:
I am currently Lecturer in the History of English at Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne. I was recently a U.S. National Science Foundation International Research Fellowship Post-doctoral fellow at the University of Iceland, where my collaborators and I built a syntactically parsed, diachronic corpus of Icelandic,
Research
I work on Syntax (especially scrambling, the West Germanic verb-raising construction, and testing predictions of Antisymmetry), Morphosyntactic Variation, Language Change in all its aspects, methods for building and analyzing diachronic syntactically parsed corpora, and Metrics. I am particularly interested in using the syntactic variation (both historical and modern) among the Germanic languages and dialects to investigate questions in these areas, especially with regard to the relationship between syntactic change, language acquisition, and language contact.
Take this little baby. He doesn't know shit about social stratification.
--William Labov
Dissertation
I received my Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania, and it focused on scrambling, the Antisymmetry Hypothesis, and syntactic change (especially in Germanic). The thesis is entitled Antisymmetry and the Conservation of C-Command: Scrambling and Phrase Structure in Synchronic and Diachronic Perspective.
Curriculum Vitae
Publications
| Under review |
with Caroline Heycock
Explaining the loss of verb movement: How embedded V2 and V-in-situ conspired against V-to-T. DRAFT. PDF |
| Under review |
Scrambling, LF, and Phrase Structure Change in Yiddish. DRAFT. PDF |
| To appear |
Antisymmetry and Heavy NP Shift Across Germanic, PDF
DRAFT. Syntax over Time: Lexical, Morphological and Information-Structural Interactions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Presented at DIGS 12, 2009, Slides |
| To appear |
Language Acquisition in German and Phrase Structure Change in Yiddish, PDF
Parameter Theory and Dynamics of Change . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Presented at DIGS 11, 2009, Slides |
| To appear |
with Josef Fruewald and Jonathan Gress-Wright Phonological Rule Change: The Constant Rate Effect, PDF Proceedings NELS 40 Presented at NELS 40, 2009 |
| 2008 |
with Mark Dredze Further Results and Analysis of Icelandic Part of Speech Tagging, PDF Technical Report MS-CIS-08-13, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania |
| 2008 |
with Mark Dredze Icelandic Data Driven Part of Speech Tagging, PDF Proceedings of The 46th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computation Linguistics (ACL) Presented at ACL 46 |
| 2007 |
English Weak Pronouns and Object Shift, PDF Proceedings of the 26th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 27-29 April, 2007, University of California at Berkeley. Cascadilla Press. |
| 2006 |
Formal linguistics meets the Boojum: metrical variation in Lewis Carroll’s verse, PDF Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, University of California at Berkeley Presented at BLS 31 |
| 2005 |
The Story of the American –self: a case study in morphological variation, PDF Penn Working Papers in Linguistics Vol. 11.1: Proceedings of the 28th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium Presented at PLC 28 |
Selected Presentations
| 2012 |
with Anton Karl Ingason and Einar Freyr Sigurðsson Antisocial Syntax: Disentangling the Icelandic VO/OV parameter and its lexical remains. , Slides Presented at 14th Meeting of the Diachronic Generative Syntax (DIGS) Conference DIGS 14 University of Lisboa. July 6, 2012 |
| 2012 |
Diachrony as a Laboratory for Syntactic Theory: the two Germanic
subject positions and change in English.
, Slides
University of York. January 25, 2012. |
| 2011 |
with Anton Karl Ingason and Einar Freyr Sigurðsson Distinguishing change and stability – a quantitative study of Icelandic oblique subjects , Slides Presented at 13th Meeting of the Diachronic Generative Syntax (DIGS) Conference DIGS 13 University of Pennsylvania. June 4, 2011 |
| 2011 |
with Caitlin Light On the use of passives across Germanic , Slides Presented at 13th Meeting of the Diachronic Generative Syntax (DIGS) Conference DIGS 13 University of Pennsylvania. June 5, 2011 |
| 2011 |
Towards A Field of Comparative Quantitative Information Structure
, Slides
Presented at 9th Meeting of the Symposium on Historical English Syntax (SHES) SHES 9 University of Leiden. April 17, 2011 |
| 2010 |
What Doesn’t Change, Doesn’t Change: antisymmetry and HNPS across Germanic , Handout Slides Presented at 12th Meeting of the Diachronic Generative Syntax (DIGS) Conference DIGS 12 Queens College, University of Cambridge. July 14, 2010 |
| 2010 |
Antisymmetry and the Information Structure of Heavy NP Shift Across Germanic , Slides Presented at 25th Meeting of the Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop CGSW 25 University of Tromsø, Norway. June 11, 2010 |
| 2010 |
with Anton Karl Ingason and Einar Freyr Sigurðsson Extending the Comparative Dimension of Diachronic Syntax: A Parsed Corpus of Icelandic from the 12th Century to Modern Times, Slides Presented at University of Massachusetts, Amherst May 11, 2010 and at New York University, May 14 2010 |
| 2010 |
with Anton Karl Ingason and Einar Freyr Sigurðsson 12th Century Homilies: the cutting edge in parsing, Slides Presented at Íslensk Máltækni 2010 Háskólinn í Reykjavík (Reykjavík University) April 15, 2010 |