Some Basics

This picture was taken by my wonderful colleague Julie McGory in July 2019.

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. My core expertise is phonology – particularly interactions of metrical structure, (intonational) tone, and segmental structure – and its interfaces with phonetics and morphology, from both a synchronic and a diachronic typological perspective. Furthermore, I am the associate editor of the phonology section at Glossa. In 2019, I received an NSF CAREER award for a project with the title “Mechanisms of Sound Change in Continental West Germanic.”

My current primary focus is on so-called tone accent languages that combine word stress and tonal distinctions (such as Franconian, Lithuanian, or Swedish). In my research, I combine elements from historical linguistics, phonetics, psycholinguistics, and dialectology with phonological theory, often based on original fieldwork.