Historical Morphology
I study the history of verbal morphology in the Mayan language family. In particular, I focus on constructions that walk the line between derivational and inflectional in Mayan languages: perfect participles, infinitives, and nominalizations. These resemble inflectional morphology in that they are often productive and have highly compositional meaning, but also look derivational in that they change the category of the word. Beyond establishing which morphemes across the family are cognate, I treat morphology as a system and explore how that system changed over time. My dissertation reconstructs the history of perfect aspect marking from proto-Mayan through modern Mayan languages.
Language Contact
My work on historical morphology necessarily makes reference to precolonial language contact among Mayan languages. This heavy contact among related languages is both striking and difficult to analyze, in that it is not always clear which features are due to shared inheritance and which are due to contact (for a thorough discussion of this challenge, see Law 2014). At times, the existing structural similarities among Mayan languages seem to have permitted types of contact that would be typologically rare otherwise. For example, I argue that at least two perfect participle suffixes have spread areally through direct affix borrowing: one (-b'il) in the robust Maya Lowlands linguistic area, and the other (-maj) in what I propose to be a previously unidentified contact zone among northern K'iche'an and Mamean languages (the "Sacapulas Corridor"). For more detail, see my publications and conference presentations.
Poqom history and philology
Within the Mayan language family, I have a special focus on Poqomchi' and Poqomam (collectively "Poqom"), two closely related K'iche'an languages spoken in the central highlands of Guatemala. Poqom shows evidence of contact from Ch'olan languages (see Law 2014); in a recent presentation I discussed the diffusion of the Lowland Mayan phoneme p' into Poqomam and Western Poqomchi'.
Poqomam and Poqomchi' are attested in almost five thousand pages of colonial documents, some dating to the early 1600s. I have a long-term project to transcribe colonial Poqom texts and analyze their linguistic features from a historical perspective. A full list of extant Colonial Poqom documents and my transcriptions of individual documents may be found on this page.
Constructed Languages
My first exposure to linguistics proper was through the constructed languages of J.R.R. Tolkien, and it is an interest that I have maintained throughout my formal linguistics training. I see language construction as an art form and essential creative extension of linguistics, a reminder that no linguistic feature exists in isolation, and a way to explore linguistic topics that are not otherwise foregrounded in my research. I am also interested in language construction as a vehicle for teaching linguistics (inspired by efforts such as those presented in the excellent volume Punske, Sanders, and Fountain (eds.) 2020). I strive to make my own conlangs naturalistic, with processes of historical change that make sense for their (fictional) cultural setting.
I have done conlang commission work in the past. If this is a service you are interested in, please contact me at the email address on my homepage.