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SAM ZUKOFF, linguist

I recently completed a position as Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Southern California. My research focuses on phonology, morphology, and historical linguistics.

RECENT AND UPCOMING PAPERS AND PRESENTATIONS

The Mirror Alignment Principle:
Morpheme Ordering at the Morphosyntax-Phonology Interface
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You can derive the Mirror Principle by projecting c-command relations in the morphosyntax onto domination relations among alignment constraints in the phonology. This allows for a unified analysis of all sorts of morpheme ordering problems, including Arabic nonconcatenative verbal morphology and asymmetric compositionality in the Bantu CARP template.
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My article just came out in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory!
Click the link below for the article. (If you're paywalled, email me.)
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NLLT
Reduplicant Shape Alternations in Ponapean and Tawala:
Re-evaluating the Evidence for Base-Dependence
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Reduplicant shape alternations in Ponapean and Tawala are easy to explain in BRCT, using surface-oriented phonological constraints. From this perspective, they seem to constitute "base-dependence", something which Morphological Doubling Theory (MDT) predicts shouldn't exist. I show that MDT actually can derive these patterns, but it requires a ton of heavy machinery (which maybe we don't want...). 
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I've been presenting about this in a bunch of places recently. 
The most comprehensive version is the handout
from my invited talk at AFLA 28 (which is up on YouTube).
Go to my publications and presentations pages to find more.
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AFLA handout
YouTube
Another Look at Mobile Affixation in Moro
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Jenks & Rose (2015) showed that certain suffixes in Moro can become prefixes to optimize the tone pattern on a stem. I show that we can streamline their analyze to pinpoint exactly what's going on: affix mobility does optimize for tone, but it's really about alignment. 
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Come see my poster presentation at the LSA.
If you can't wait, check out my hot-off-the-presses squib on LingBuzz.
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LingBuzz
(Partial) Copy Epenthesis in Scottish Gaelic
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In Stanton & Zukoff (2018), we argued that you need correspondence in order to analyze the prosodic properties of copy epenthesis in Scottish Gaelic, as well as other languages including Selayarese and Ho-Chunk. Conditioned partial copy epenthesis in Scottish Gaelic helps us refine our theoretical model. We show that front/back agreement in copy epenthesis is an emergence of the unmarked effect, which requires a model with asymmetric correspondence.
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Click below for our handout from the Stony Brook Epenthesis and Beyond workshop. And you can also check out our 2018 NLLT paper.
Stay tuned for more on the typology of copy vs. default epenthesis.
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Handout
NLLT Paper