What is a Lexical-Functional approach to Barayin Morphosyntax?

Last month, I had a book published on a fairly niche topic: Barayin Morphosyntax: A Lexical-Functional Approach. In the words of Facebook friend Jon Laurion, “I had to look up the definition of most of the words in the definition of Barayin Morphosyntax.” I’m not sure the blurb on the book cover or website is

Kayardild is an unusual language

I recently had a chapter I worked on with Daniel Ross published in a book called Associated Motion edited by Antoine Guillaume and Harold Koch. (It’s not open access, but feel free to ask me for a copy if you don’t have institutional access.) My involvement in the project came from a workshop at the

What’s so special about Urdu complex predicates?

I have a new paper out from the conference proceedings of the 2020 Lexical-Functional Grammar conference. (The online presentation is still available here.) My paper was on the analysis of Urdu complex predicates in LFG. It’s a very technical paper, probably only interesting to people already familiar with LFG, but I’ll try to briefly explain

Language Documentation as a Scientific Enterprise

I’m leading the Introduction to Language Documentation & Description course for graduate students at SOAS this term. I recently gave a lecture on why creating a corpus of annotated texts is useful, or even essential, for describing the grammar of a (previously unstudied) language. Most of my own descriptive analysis has been about a language

New paper: Minimal phrase structure in LFG

A new syntax article is now online in the Journal of Language Modelling! I worked on this with John Lowe, building on a previous paper we wrote for the 2017 LFG conference. In that 2017 paper, we developed a formal system (one that we implemented in a parser, XLE) that creates representations of the phrase

Syntax is fascinating

More than one person recently sent me this screenshot explaining that adjectives in a noun phrase in English have to go in a quite specific order, for example, big red balloon clearly sounds better than red big balloon. That particular screenshot is probably from a 2016 tweet pointing out how amazing it is that native

Plural nouns in East Chadic

Back in January, Lameen Souag wrote a few blog posts (one, two, three, four) trying to untangle the complexity of plural nouns in Mubi, an East Chadic language spoken in the Guera region of Chad. Irregular plural forms are pretty common, but Mubi has an excessive number of ways of making plural nouns. When Carsten