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SAM ZUKOFF, linguist
I am currently an Assistant Adjunct Professor at UCLA. My research focuses on phonology, morphology, and historical linguistics. I work primarily on the morphophonology of nonconcatenative morphological patterns, such as reduplication, root-and-pattern morphology, and mobile affixation.
RECENT AND UPCOMING PAPERS AND PRESENTATIONS
The Mirror Alignment Principle:
Morpheme Ordering at the Morphosyntax-Phonology Interface
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.
Check out my article in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory for the main results. Click the link below for the article. (If you're paywalled, email me.)
I have recently presented follow-up work on suffix doubling and BD-correspondence in Bantu at M@100 and AMP 2023, investigating the extent to which BD-correspondence on its own might be able to generate these phenomena. This project also includes work on mobile affixation in Huave and Moro. Head to my publications and presentations pages to find out more.
Reduplicant Shape Alternations in Ponapean and Tawala:
Re-evaluating the Evidence for Base-Dependence
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...).
I have a manuscript under review on the Tawala portion of this project, which you can find on lingbuzz. (You can also find an earlier version of this paper that includes the Ponapean portion of this project on lingbuzz here.)
If you'd like to see it in presentation form, you can check out
my invited talk at AFLA 28, which is up on YouTube.
(Partial) Copy Epenthesis in Scottish Gaelic
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.
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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