2019 presented at the 25th Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference. Abstract:. This paper explores the variation in the phonological structures of Plautdietsch plural formation. Variation can be split into two types: prosodic structural variation and variation in the realization of synchornic Multiple Exponence (ME). The prosodic structural variation reflects a conservative property shared by Plautdietsch and other varieties of Low German to the exclusion of Central German and High German. The prosodic changes led to some of the realizations of ME but other Plautdietsch specific sound innovations increased the opacity of certain alternations resulting in an increase in the exponents of plurality.

2018 in Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics. Abstract:. This paper examines the source of secondary palatalization in the Eastern Low German region of Posnań (German Posen). While some scholars are of the view that palatalization is an inherited feature of Germanic (van der Hoek 2010), this paper shows that the development of palatalization in the region of Posnań relies on a phonological property of Slavic that is not found in Germanic languages.

2016 in the Journal of Linguistic Geography. Abstract:.This paper provides an account of the long vowel shift currently underway in the trans-statal Plautdietsch speech community. Placement of the shift within Labov's typology of vowel shifts reveals a commonly overlooked development in Plautdietsch vowel movement, namely the centralization of mid-high back vowels which must have occurred before the breakup of the community into New and Old World groups. Shared centralization prompted both groups to have similar developments in the back vowel space after they were no longer geographically contiguous and prompted many groups to undergo centralization in the front vowel space. This case study reveals a pattern of innovation in which separation from parent communities fosters linguistic innovations in daughter communities. These innovations occur irrespective of the traditional Molotschna or Chortitza dialect affiliation of the daughter colonies in question.

2012 presented at the 18th Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference. Abstract:While some scholars have argued that consonant palatalization in West Germanic is the result of language contact, others have made the argument that it is inherited (Huß 1911; Weise 1911; Teuchert 1913; Koerth 1914; Gréb 1921; Jacobs 1996; van der Hoek 2010). Additionally, one must consider that palatalization could have been innovated independent of contact as it is a common cross-linguistic development. In this paper, I argue that within the eastern most reaches of the Low German speaking territory of the 20th century, palatalization should be understood to be due to inheritance, contact, and endogenous change. One can come to this conclusion on the basis of the geographical distribution of segments which undergo palatalization and the segment outcomes and compare that with cross-linguistic tendencies and regional socio-political evidence.

2012 presented at the 37th Annual Conference on African Linguistics. . Abstract: Anti-Agreement Effects (AAE) in Bantu languages are descriptively the selection of one agreement marker over another. Theoretically this morphological alternation is the fall out from subject extraction in relative clauses and wh-questions. Previous accounts of Bantu AAE (Schneider-Zioga 2000) argue that long distance extraction can induce optional AAE, but this optionality is treated as free morphological variation. Based on evidence from Abo (A42), a North-Western Bantu language, I argue that even seemingly "optional" AAE should not be understood as free morphological variation and is in fact governed by syntactic principles.

2012 : An introductory linguistics lecture with a brief overview of the history of the English language. This lecture includes a video link to the Open Univeristy's History of English condensed.

2012 : This lecture was given as a midterm review for an introductory class for non-majors. While I doubt you will be studying for the exact same midterm, I would encourage you to look at this if you are interested in presentation style. The topics covered in this review are phonetics, phonology, and morphology.

2012 : This lecutre was given to an introductory class for linguistics majors. The lecture gives a short overview of different types of gender systems and then discusses how different systems are typologically related to each other by using WALS.