Hello! I'm Sam.

 

I'm a Phonologist. I study the way that processes of complex word formation affect the distribution of sounds within languages, and the ways in which languages allow corresponding sounds in related words to be different and/or require them to be the same, in order to better understand the cognitive architecture that underlies the grammatical system of human language. I also study the way these phenomena change over time, and what this sort of change tells us about the language learning process and the language faculty generally.​

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More specifically, I investigate reduplication and other types of nonconcatenative/prosodic morphology, as a means of trying to determine what theoretical machinery our models of phonology and morphology really need, things like:​