I am primarily interested in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European from a morphological perspective in terms of both nouns and verbs. However, I also am interested in how sound change may occur on the basis of acoustic and perceptual phonetics.

Diphthongization in Greek: Several Ancient Greek dialects, Lesbian, Cyrenean, and crucially Elean, show diphthongal outcomes for the second compensatory lengthening, each with different distributions. I argue that these diphthongs arise due to perceptual factors such as formant transitions that lead listeners to misanalyze the nasal as a nasalized glide. This glide then diphthongizes before losing its nasalization. I also account for the odd distribution of this sequence in Elean based off an analogical restoration.

• A 'Forma(n)tive' Misperception: The rise of diphthongization in Elean. 2021.  East Coast Indo-European Conference XL (ECIEC). [MA Thesis]

The outcome of *-os in Slavic: Slavic famously has two outcomes for the sequence of word-final *-os, -ъ and -o, with Old Novgorod showing an additional -e outcome.  Recent accounts (Olander 2012) have argued in favor of a sound change involving an intermediate stage where pre-PS *a became *ə before (R)s#. I believe that this sound change must be further constrained in order to properly account for the distributions.

Many languages show declension or conjugation type phenomena where allomorphy is conditioned by seemingly arbitrary (neither syntactic nor phonological) features. Some models of morphology (like Distributed Morphology) explain such aberrant class types via memorized features known as diacritics.

Nanosyntax and Allomorphy:  Recent work in Nanosyntax (Caha et al. 2019, Caha 2020) introduces an account for diacritic phenomena based off of the assumption that lexical entries contain syntactic structure. Different allomorphs are conditioned by differently sized roots, removing the need for diacritics. I argue that this theory is too restrictive and fails to account for the full breadth of cross-linguistic variation, primarily using data from plurals in German, Welsh, and Albanian.

• The Limits of Root-Controlled Allomorphy. 2021. North East Linguistics Society (NELS 52).

• On Non-Adjacent Allomorphy: Evaluating Predictions from Nanosyntax. 2021. Syntax, Phonology and Language Analysis 14 (SinFonIJA 14).

Based off of a field methods course, I have also worked on impersonal passive constructions in Sakha (Yakut), a Siberian Turkic language spoken in Yakutia, Russia. 

Impersonal Passives in Sakha : Building off of Legate & Akkuş (2017), Tamisha L. Tan and I argue that the passive morpheme in Sakha -IlIn- is the fossilized outcome of a doubled 'passive of passive' construction that is still found in other Turkic languages. We show that this morpheme serves not only as a passive morpheme in the traditional sense but also as an impersonal, using several syntactic diagnostics. In addition, we present an account that has important implications for the reconstruction of the Turkic voice system.

•  The Double Duty of the Sakha "Passive". 2021. Tu+5 Workshop. [handout].

• An Impersonal Look at Sakha Passives. LSA 94th Annual Meeting.