Research
My research is in syntax and morphology, with a focus on how surface morphological patterns reveal the structure of clauses, verbal domains, and nominalized expressions. I work primarily on Iranian languages, especially Behbahani, and I am interested in how data from underdocumented languages can sharpen broader theoretical questions about argument structure, agreement, and the syntax-morphology interface.
Verbal structure and morphological form
One strand of my research asks how verbal morphology reflects syntactic structure. I am especially interested in cases where stem choice, tense/aspect morphology, and verbal derivation are not independent pieces of morphology, but instead track the size and composition of the verbal domain.
In my work on Behbahani, this question becomes central because past and non-past stems interact with transitivity, agreement, and non-finite morphology in ways that suggest a close relationship between stem formation and syntactic structure.
Argument indexing without morphological case
A second strand of my research investigates how languages organize subject and object indexing when overt case morphology is absent. This is theoretically useful because it allows agreement and alignment to be studied without assuming that case marking is doing the explanatory work.
Behbahani provides an important empirical domain for this question: argument indexing is sensitive to verbal environment and argument expression, even though the language does not mark arguments with morphological case.
Nominalization and non-finite structure
I also study nominalized and non-finite forms as diagnostics for verbal structure. Agentive, resultative, and infinitival forms can reveal how much verbal structure is present below the nominal layer, and whether argument-introducing structure is available in a given domain.
This part of my work connects the analysis of individual morphological forms to larger questions about Voice, argument introduction, and the boundary between verbal and nominal structure.
Underdocumented Iranian languages and formal theory
My research is also shaped by a commitment to bringing underdocumented Iranian languages into formal linguistic theory. I treat documentation and theoretical analysis as mutually reinforcing: careful empirical description creates the foundation for formal argumentation, while theoretical questions help identify which patterns require deeper documentation.
For a general introduction to Behbahani, see the Behbahani page. For specific ongoing projects, including computational modeling and corpus development, see the Projects page.
Selected current work
- Dissertation: syntax and morphology of Behbahani verbal structure, with a focus on stem choice, argument indexing, and non-finite domains.
- Conference work: selectional restrictions on Voice and stem-driven split alignment in Behbahani.
- Ongoing work: documentation, corpus development, and computational modeling of selected aspects of Behbahani agreement and verbal morphology.