The bulk of my research is in phonological theory. Phonology is the study of linguistic speech sound patterns and structures, and the relation of these systems to other aspects of grammar. Phonological theorists like myself are primarily concerned with the development and evaluation of formal devices that adequately describe phonological patterns and structures and that provide maximum explanatory value to particular phonological analyses. My own work is mainly concerned with how very general constraints on phonological forms can interact with each other in different ways to produce complex patterns of phonological behavior in different languages. I am particularly interested in probing very basic principles that are assumed to underlie phonological knowledge. Do these principles need to be stated directly, or do they follow from other, more basic principles?
Articles
Assimilation, antigemination, and contingent optionality: the phonology of monoconsonantal proclitics in Polish (with Bożena Pająk), Natural Language and Linguistic Theory (2010)
Baković (2005) analyzes the avoidance of 'sufficiently similar' adjacent consonants as the interaction of independent...
Complementizers, Faithfulness, and Optionality, Revista Virtual de Estudos da Linguagem - ReVEL (2010)
In this paper I advance a theory of optionality in syntax within OT, using the...
Abstractness and motivation in phonological theory, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistic (2009)
Even the most basic work of phonological description and analysis involves some amount of abstraction...
A revised typology of opaque generalisations, Phonology (2007)
This paper is about opaque interactions between phonological processes in the two senses defined by...
Antigemination, assimilation, and the determination of identity, Phonology (2005)
Avoidance of adjacent consonants that are 'sufficiently identical' -- that is, identical except for possible...
Books
Blocking and complementarity in phonological theory (2013)
Disjunctive application is a type of interaction between phonological mappings that has received special attention...
Wondering at the Natural Fecundity of Things: Essays in Honor of Alan Prince (with Junko Ito and John McCarthy) (2006)
This volume honors Alan Prince on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday (June 20, 2006)....
Harmony, Dominance and Control (2000)
In this dissertation I argue for a general model of assimilation within Optimality Theory, with...
Book Chapters
Phonology and phonological theory, The Oxford Handbook of Language Production (2012)
The purpose of this chapter is to provide what I hope is a useful overview...
Opacity and ordering, The Handbook of Phonological Theory (2nd ed.), to appear (2010)
Few notions in phonological theory have received as much attention in the literature as opacity....
Local blocking and minimal violation, Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (2009)
The Elsewhere Condition (Kiparsky 1973, 1982) blocks a rule B from applying when a more...
Hiatus resolution and incomplete identity, Optimality-Theoretic Studies in Spanish Phonology (2007)
Potential vowel hiatus between words in Chicano Spanish is always resolved using one of several...
Unpublished Papers
Foot harmony and quantitative adjustments, Second qualifying paper, Department of Linguistics, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ (1996)
Foot structure can affect syllable weight, as is well known from the analysis of minimal...
A markedness subhierarchy in syntax: optimality and inversion in Spanish, First qualifying paper, Department of Linguistics, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ (1995)
In this paper, inversion (verb-subject word order, seen as head movement) in Spanish wh-questions is...
Presentations
Breaking down rule interactions, North American Phonology Conference 7 (2012)
Pairwise rule interactions, particularly the familiar feeding-type and bleeding-type interactions (Kiparsky 1968), have been at...
Why and how not to counterbleed (with Bożena Pająk), Workshop on Phonological Voicing Variation (2008)
Looks can be deceiving: transparency revisited, Current Perspectives on Phonology Workshop, PhonologyFest (2006)
Phonological opacity and counterfactual derivation, Approaches to phonological opacity workshop, 29th GLOW Colloquium (2006)
Other
Review of _The prosody-morphology interface_ (with Edward Keer), Phonology (2000)
This volume consists of a subset of the papers presented at a workshop on Prosodic...