Research
Western Armenian
My research primarily explores issues related to language acquisition and morpho-syntax through the lens of Western Armenian, a language which is primarily, if not exclusively, spoken in minority language contexts in diasporic communities scattered across diverse parts of the globe. Western Armenian therefore has great potential to inform our understanding of such phenomena as language acquisition, maintenance, change, and shift. My goals for this research are twofold: (1) to contribute to the linguistic description of WA, which remains under-described in the linguistic literature, and (2) to contribute to the knowledge base of these higher level linguistic phenomena from a previously unexplored language context.
Western Armenian Word Order
This project investigates word order in declaratives and simple wh-questions in Western Armenian in order to describe wh-question formation in Western Armenian. The project proposes constraints on word order and investigates to what extent adult heritage speakers of Western Armenian adhere to proposed constraints in their judgments of questions with varying word orders.
Morphological Case in Western Armenian
This project investigates Western Armenian heritage speaker knowledge of morphological case, a phenomenon that previous work has shown is vulnerable in heritage language grammars.
Mutual Intelligibility of Eastern and Western Armenian
This project aims to explore to what degree the two standard vareities of Modern Armenian, Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian, are mutually intelligible using a listening comprehension task.
Morphosyntactic Variation in Hawaiʻi English
I have also collaborated on research exploring morphosyntactic variation in Hawaiʻi English with Anu Reddy, Jue Wang, and Katie Drager. This project investigates how social factors may modulate the rate at which Hawaiʻi English speakers contract modal verbs.