I'm a 5th year graduate student at MIT Linguistics. My main areas of specialization are Theoretical Phonology and Morphology, and Indo-European/Historical Linguistics. My research focuses on reduplication and other phonological problems at/near the phonology-morphology interface. An overarching theme of my research is the drive to explain "templatic" effects without reference to templates, but rather through interaction of independent factors; e.g., Can prosodic templates in reduplication be explained by independent facts about stress? Can Semitic nonconcatenative morphology be explained directly through interaction of morpheme ordering and phonotactics?

My dissertation (in progress) is on the analysis and history of reduplication in the ancient Indo-European languages. It constructs analyses for the reduplicative systems of the attested languages (Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Gothic, Hittite, etc.), and seeks to explain how exceptional/archaic patterns develop and are retained into the languages. Both the analytical and historical results are used to inform the reconstruction of the reduplicative system of Proto-Indo-European (PIE), to situate both PIE and the attested daughter languages within the cross-linguistic typology of reduplication, and develop new insights into the nature of systemic diachronic change of phonological grammars.