Research Profile
Iroquoian, Caddoan, and Gaelic languages; language description and documentation; historical and comparative linguistics of the greater Mississippi region; polysynthesis; morphophonology; language revitalisation and community-oriented scholarship.
PhD Project: Proto-Trans-Mississippian
The question of a genealogical relationship between the Iroquoian and Caddoan language families has seen nearly a century of speculation and commentary in the literature. This study attempts to answer the question through a reconstruction of a language ancestral to all Iroquoian and Caddoan varieties; a language I call Proto-Trans-Mississippian. The dissertation will provide a lexical reconstruction based on a newly compiled comparative database which includes all roots from the documented Trans-Mississippian languages. The work will then turn to a detailed description of Proto-Trans-Mississippian grammar as reconstructed from the intricate and rich complexities of the present-day languages. The study will close by presenting evidence that Proto-Trans-Mississippian was not nearly as polysynthetic as its descendant languages and will show that instead it is much more likely to have had an SOV clause structure of looser constituency more similar to other families of the Mississippian area. In addition to providing an answer to whether Iroquoian and Caddoan are related, then, this dissertation will also represent a rare case study in the reconstructed development of polysynthesis.
Outside of this project, I am working on descriptions of contemporary Trans-Mississippian languages, primarily sáhniš/Arikara and Kitsai, and on the synchronic and diachronic typology of noun incorporation. I also have secondary research interests in non-Atlantic-Congo/non-Afroasiatic languages of Northeastern Africa and am invested in language revitalisation efforts with Gaelic and Trans-Mississippian communities.
