Research
You can't understand anything without understanding where it came from. So as a phonologist, my main interests are in answering three related (sets of) questions:
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How and why does sound change happen, and how does it relate to child language acquisition?
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How much can models of diachrony explain synchronic facts, either about the phonologies of particular languages or about phonological typology?
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What should a synchronic theory of phonology look like, once we've factored out the explanatory work that diachrony does for us?
My dissertation is about applying this way of thinking to a case study of the crosslinguistic asymmetry between the labiodental fricative [f] and the interdental fricative [θ]. I'm a historical phonologist, really, but phonetics, speech perception, language acquisition, sociolinguistics, cultural evolution, and the mathematics of complex systems are all fields I'm trying to understand better.
My linguistic interests are in the history of the Indo-European languages and the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European; so far I've worked on Greek, Latin, and Armenian.
Collaborators (so far): Samuel Andersson, James Burridge, Andrea Ceolin, Campbell Nilsen, Yining Nie, Gareth Roberts, Bridget Samuels, Katie Schuler, Bert Vaux, Jérémy Zehr