Research

I do a lot of different projects, all of which are pretty small but with a chance of growing into something big one day.

Forest Nenets phonology

Forest Nenets is one of the least studied minority Uralic language of Russia. It is mainly spoken in Yamalo-Nenets okrug (Northwestern Siberia). Forest Nenets stress preserves the length contrast and the mid-high quality contrast in vowels only in the stressed syllables. Monosyllables, despite being stressed, are neutralized by length, but not by quality. I am looking for the representational and derivational explanation behind this unusual pattern, since I consider it an interesting case of positional and prosodic strength intertwined: note that monosyllables are both stressed and final.

Work on this topic

Nothing published but coming soon!

L2 Russian of Forest Nenets speakers

The primary contact language for speakers of Forest Nenets (FN) is Russian, where stops and fricatives are contrasted by voicing. Forest Nenets, on the other hand, has no voicing contrast whatsoever. Their accent in Russian is characterized by what sounds like complete absence of voiced consonants to my Russian ear. I have studied sociolinguistic interviews conducted in Russian in order to test this hypothesis, and the neutralization is indeed real. It does not, however, affect the Russian vowel /v/, which is voiced correctly by FN speakers. I speculate on the reasons behind this exception, which lie both in the phonology of FN and of Russian.

Work on this topic

Nothing published but coming soon!

Morphophonological alternations in Uralic languages

Anything that happens at morpheme boundaries draws my interest, and since I am exposed to some underresearched Uralic languages, I study them with a CVCV lens. I have looked at glide insertion in Moksha, which occurs in between /u i/-final bases and vowel-initial suffixes. I claim that this rule is a side effect of quality-conditioned stress, which I reanalyze with virtual length. Also, I have worked on the schwa-zero alternations in Kazym Khanty, for which I assume the existence of three different schwas: epenthetic, floating and associated.

Work on this topic

📄 Quality-conditioned stress as length: glide epenthesis in Moksha

under review for Radical: a Journal of Phonology

📌 The three faces of Kazym Khanty schwa

invited talk at Atelier de phonologie (SFL, CNRS & Université Paris 8)

Syntax of non-finite modal constructions in Uralic languages

Constructions that look half verbal and half nominal often make curious puzzles. Such is, for example, the so-called mermaid construction in Kazym Khanty, which I argue to be biclausal, contrary to Tsunoda (2020). In Moksha, I have analysed a nominalisation with a debitive meaning, which exhibits an interesting case & agreement pattern.

Work on this topic

📄 Case and agreement puzzle in the Moksha debitive

to appear in Journal of Uralic Linguistics

📄 Mermaid construction: a case of Kazym Khanty

in Proceedings of ConSOLE XXX, P. 89–101

Russian phrasal comparatives

I believe that no existing analysis of the Russian comparative is completely satisfactory. There are two major types of comparatives in Russian: one is uncontroversially clausal but the other, despite seeming phrasal, has been claimed to contain a small clause (Pancheva 2006, Philippova 2017). I defend a direct analysis for the second type of Russian comparatives, that is, that it is genuinely phrasal.

Work on this topic

📄 More than a small clause: Russian adverbial comparatives

prepared for Proceedings of ConSOLE XXXI

References

Pancheva, Roumyana. 2006. Phrasal and clausal comparatives in Slavic. In Formal approaches to Slavic linguistics, vol. 14, 236–257.

Philippova, Tatiana. 2017. Ellipsis in the phrasal comparative: evidence from correlate constraints. In Andrew Lamont & Katerina A. Tetzloff (eds.), Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 47), vol. 3, 1–14. Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications.

Tsunoda, Tasaku 2020. Mermaid Construction: A Compound ­Predicate Construction with Biclausal Appearance. Wal­ter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.