My current research focus is on agreement patterns in Welsh, specifically on providing a unified account of agreement clitics on nonfinite verbs in various so-called 'periphrastic' constructions. More broadly I am interested in feature-theory in syntax (under Minimalism) and morphology (under Distributed Morphology), and aim to investigate variation in agreement patterns cross-linguistically, especially in the Celtic language family.
I am currently conducting research for my first Generals Paper in the PhD program at the University of Toronto on the patterning of agreement clitics on Welsh verbal-nouns.
Dec 5, 2023 - March 31, 2024. Department of Linguistics SSHRC Institutional Grant (SIG). $250. Elicitation on Welsh Agreement Clitics. University of Toronto.
April 1, 2024 - March 31, 2024. Department of Linguistics SSHRC Institutional Grant (SIG). $150. Elicitation on Agreement and verbal nouns in Welsh. University of Toronto.
2024. When and How to Agree: Insights from Middle and Modern Welsh. 43rd Harvard Celtic Colloquium. Harvard University. October 11. Slides.
2024. Agreement with nominal antecedents in Welsh. Canadian Linguistic Association Conference 2024. Carleton University. June 18.
My undergraduate honors thesis at UC Berkeley looked at the interaction between verse constraints and syntactic well-formedness in medieval Welsh poetry. Specifically, I worked with a set of nine cywydd poems by the renowned 14th century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym to show that the use of linguistically marked constructions—like inverted attributive adjective constructions and dropped preverbal particles—are motivated by constraints on verse form: alliterative requirements, rhyme, and meter. Following Fitzgerland (2007) and Youmans (2009), I developed an Optimality Theoretic analysis of the interaction between verse and syntactic constraints in Dafydd's poetry.
Going forward, I will expand this work to dropped prepositions and other deviations from standard linguistic production in cywyddau by Dafydd and other late medieval Welsh poets. In particular, I am interested in examining the aspects of semantic compositionality that are affected by so-called 'poetic license' in addition to those of syntactic well-formedness.
Key references
Youmans, Gilbert. 2009. For all this werlde ryche: syntactic inversions as evidence for metrical principles in the alliterative Morte Arthure. Approaches to the Metres of Alliterative Verse. Leeds Texts and Monographs, New Series 7: 115-133.
Fitzgerland, Colleen. 2007. An optimality treatment of syntactic inversions in English verse. Language Sciences 29(2-3): 203-217.
2024. Constraints on verse form and syntactic well-formedness in the cywyddau of Dafydd ap Gwilym. Language and Literature 33(3): 199-220. DOI: 10.1177/09639470241273555
2023. (Post-)Syntactic Variation in Early Modern Welsh Poetry: An Optimality Theoretic Approach. Manuscript.
2024. Towards a formal linguistic approach to control in poetry. Poetics and Linguistics Association Conference 2024. Sheffield Hallam University. June 26. Schedule.
2024. Towards a refined parameterization of poetic “fit:” a case study in Welsh verse forms. Celtic Students Conference 2024. Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest. May 31. Schedule.
2024. Linguistic approaches to poetic data: a case study in Dafydd ap Gwilym’s cywyddau. Annual Meeting of the Celtic Studies Association of North America 2024. Fairleigh Dickinson University. April 5. Schedule.
2023. Verse constraints and syntactic well-formedness in medieval Welsh poetry. 15th LGCU Welcome Workshop. University of Toronto. October 20.
2023. Syntactic variation in Early Modern Welsh poetry: an optimality theoretic approach. Linguistics Undergraduate Honors Colloquium 2023. University of California, Berkeley. May 1.