Research

Areas of specialty:

My main area of research is in morphology, including its interface with syntax and phonology, using the following methods:

• computational modelling of the lexicon and its interface with syntax
• using default reasoning as a way of capturing regularity, semi-regularity and exceptionality
• using frequency analysis as a way of modeling language use
• incorporating diachronic data into synchronic models

Linguistic phenomena that I have covered using these approaches are:

• deponency
• suppletion
• grammatical number
• inflectional morphology
• word-formation
• basic color terms of the Slavonic languages

Current / recent courses:

• Modern English Grammar (= theoretical syntax)
• Grammatical Analysis (= grammatical typology)
• Historical Linguistics
• Introduction to Linguistics
• Introduction to Computational Linguistics

Selected Publications

Edited volumes:

• (with Matthew Baerman, Greville G. Corbett & Dunstan Brown). Deponency and morphological mismatches. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Recent research articles (for full list click here)

• To appear. "A declarative approach to language change: regularization as realignment." Papers from the 44th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society. Chicago:CLS. pdf
• To appear. "Morphological Typology." In Hogan, Patrick (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia for the Language Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pdf 
• "Paradigmatic realignment and morphological change:  diachronic deponency in Network Morphology." In: Wolfgand Dressler et al (eds) Variation and Change in Morphology.  Selected papers from the 13th International Morrphology Meeting, Vienna February 2008.  Amsterdam/Philadelphia:  John Benjamins, 2010. pdf
• "Lexical Analysis."  In:  Nitin Indurkhya and Frederick Damerau (eds) The Handbook of natural Language Processing, Second Edition.  31-57.  Boca Raton, Florida:  CRC Press, 2010.
• (with Ian Davies & Greville Corbett). "The basic colour terms of Lower Sorbian and Upper Sorbian and their typological relevance." pp. 56-92. Studies in Language 32 (1), 2008. pdf
• "Declarative deponency." In Baerman et al. (eds.) Deponency and morphological mismatches. pp. 145-173. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. pdf

Digital publications

• (with Matthew Baerman, Greville Corbett & Dunstan Brown). The Surrey Deponency Database. 2006. Available at http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/Deponency/Deponency_home.htm
• (with Marina Chumakina, Greville Corbett & Dunstan Brown). The Surrey Suppletion Database. 2004. Available at http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/Suppletion/index.aspx
• The Slavonic Colour Lexicon: digital recordings of Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian colour elicitation tasks. 2000. Hosted by the Max Plank Institute, available at http://corpus1.mpi.nl/ds/imdi_browser/?openpath=MPI318941%23
• Frequency and morphological analysis of the nouns in the 1 million-word Russian Uppsala Corpus. 1999. Available at http://www.surrey.ac.uk/LIS/SMG/rusnoms.xls

Current projects

• Network Morphology
  I am currently working with my collaborator Dunstan Brown on a book on Network Morphology. This is a computable theory of morphology based on the notion of defaults. For a bibliography of Network Morphology published papers, see here.
• Grammar of Shughni
  Shughni is an underdocumented East Iranian Pamir language spoken in East Tajikistan and Afghanistan. In collaboration with Greg Stump, Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby and Mark Lauersdorf, I am writing a grammar of this language. For more on our work on Shughni, see here.