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Contact
University of Massachusetts Amherst |
I am an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. My work is at the intersection of theoretical syntax and its interfaces with morphology and semantics, with a focus on endangered and un(der)studied languages. I study cross-dialectal variation in sentence structure, building primarily on data collected through fieldwork on un(der)documented languages.
My descriptive work tends to illustrate and present patterns/data that are shared by most speakers of different subcommunities or subdialects; whereas in my theoretical work, I analyze constructions/patterns that are not necessarily found in the grammars of all subcommunities.
I specialize in Arabic dialects—particularly the so-called peripheral varieties, Turkish, Mutki Zazaki and Cherokee.
You can find more information about my work and interests in the Research page.
Some Upcoming Events
- (with Elabbas Benmamoun). Categorial Features and Syntactic Change: The Case of the Present Tense in Sason Arabic. Talk at the 26th Diachronic Generative Syntax conference (DiGS26). University of Oxford. June 23-36, 2025.
- Colloquium Talk at the Linguistics department, University of Leipzig, June 6, 2025. Germany.
- Mini-course on Clitic/affixhood and morphosyntax based on the upcoming monograph ‘Case and the syntax of argument indexation’. June 2-6, 2025. Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam, Germany.
- Keynote talk at the 4th North American Conference in Iranian Linguistics (NACIL 4). May 23-25, 2025. University of Toronto, Canada
- (with Özge Bakay). An experimental investigation of conjunct agreement in Turkish. Talk at the 61st Chicago Linguistic Society Meeting (CLS 61). University of Chicago. May 9-11, 2025
Some Recent Events
- Implications of causatives for the semantic denotations and morphology of passives. Invited talk at the “Cause(e/r)-Workshop”. University of Cologne. Germany. January 23-34, 2025.
- Causatives as a window into the semantic denotations and morphology of passives. Colloquium Talk at the Oberseminar English Linguistics, University of Göttingen. Germany. January 21, 2025.
- October 24-25, 2024. Invited talk at the online conference “Puzzles of Agreement: Syntactic, Semantic and Psycholinguistic Perspectives”.
Faruk Akkuş 