Indo-Aryan Languages

My empirical focus is Indo-Aryan – the language family whose diachrony and synchrony I know most intimately. With a continuous and rich diachronic record of over 3000 years, it is also well-suited for carrying out research in diachronic semantics.  My work draws on data and patterns found in Sanskrit (Old Indo-Aryan), Prakrit/Apabhramsa (Middle Indo-Aryan) and Marathi, Hindi, and Gujarati (New Indo-Aryan).  My long-term research project is to  understand the evolution of tense/aspect/modality systems of the New Indo-Aryan languages from their Middle Indo-Aryan ancestor proto-system(s). In order to do this I am constructing morphologically analyzed corpora of Old Marathi and Middle Indo-Aryan. In addition to investigating the textual record, this requires looking at variation in the organization of synchronic systems. I am currently  documenting these systems within the understudied Bhili and Khandeshi  languages of the Central subgroup of Indo-Aryan.

The particular–characterizing contrast in the Marathi copula/auxiliary system. In Dankmar Enke, Thilo Weber, Larry Hyman, Johanna Nichols, and Guido Seiler eds. Language Change for the Worse, Language Science Press. (to appear)

On mechanisms by which languages become [nominative-]accusative. In Claire Bowern, Laurence Horn & Raffaella Zanuttini (eds.), On looking into words (and beyond), 311– 331. Berlin: Language Science Press. (2017)

Developments into and out of ergativity: Indo-Aryan diachrony. (with Miriam Butt) In Lisa Travis, Jessica Coon, and Diane Massam (eds) Handbook of Ergativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2017)

Dialects in the Indo-Aryan landscape. In John Nerbonne, Dominic Watt, and Charles Boberg eds. Handbook of Dialectology, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell (2017).

Aspect shifts in Indo-Aryan and trajectories of semantic change. (with Cleo Condoravdi) In  Chiara Gianollo, Agnes Jaeger, and Doris Penka (eds.) Language Change at the Syntax Semantics Interface. pp. 261-292. Berlin: De Gruyter. (2014)

The imperfective-perfective contrast in Middle Indic. In Journal of South Asian Linguistics 5. pp 3–33. (2012)

Poetries in contact: Arabic, Persian, and Urdu (with Paul Kiparsky). In Maria-Kristina Lotman and Mihhail Lotman ed.  Proceedings of International Conference on Frontiers in Comparative Metrics, Estonia, pp. 147–173. (2011)

Derivational morphology in inheritance–based lexica: Insights from Panini. In  Lingua 117, pp. 175–201. (2006)

The metrical organization of Classical Sanskrit verse. In Journal of Linguistics 43.1, pp. 63–114. (2006)

Typological variation in the ergative morphology of Indo-Aryan languages. (with Devyani Sharma). In  Linguistic Typology 10.3, pp. 369–418. (2006)