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Contact:

samzukoff@gmail.com

SAM ZUKOFF, linguist

I am currently a Visiting Scholar at UC San Diego. I recently completed a 2.5 year position as a Visiting Professor ("Assistant Adjunct Professor") at UCLA. I previously held similar positions at MIT, Princeton, Leipzig (Germany), and USC. I am currently exploring opportunities both within academia and outside, focusing on project management and writing/communications.

 

I study the way that sound patterns (phonology) influence, and are influenced by, processes of complex word formation (morphology). I work primarily on the morphophonology of nonconcatenative morphological patterns, such as reduplication, root-and-pattern morphology, and mobile affixation. I collaborate with specialists in phonetics, experimental phonology, and computational phonology to bring all sorts of evidence to bear on thorny questions in morphophonology, in order to improve our theoretical models of the language capacity.

RESEARCH UPDATES

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 am revising a manuscript on the Tawala portion of this project. You can find the most recent version 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.
Recopying Overapplication Opacity
in Malay Reduplication

There is no single pattern that is more significant to resolving theoretical questions in reduplication than the putative recopying overapplication of nasal spreading in Malay reduplication. Everyone agrees that if the data as originally reported is correct, it represents indisputable evidence for the existence of Base-Reduplicant Correspondence or some equivalent mechanism; however, many people have questioned whether the original reports were accurate. 

In collaboration with Jian-Leat Siah and Feng-fan Hsieh, we are conducting experimental phonetic fieldwork to investigate the data. Through acoustic production studies, we have verified the existence of the recopying pattern, which stands as one of three variants. While our data requires a more sophisticated model --
a variationist generative phonetic model implemented in MaxEnt --this work confirms the necessity of BR Correspondence in phonological theory. 

We currently have a manuscript on this topic under review at Language.
You can also find our preliminary results in the Proceedings of AMP 2024. 


 
Jian-Leat and Feng-fan recently collected nasal airflow data. We'll be presenting preliminary results at LabPhon 20 in June 2026. Stay tuned for updates!
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