Projects
My most recent work investigates the modern linguistic ecology in Greenland, especially in urban settings. I am interested in the effects of language contact, migration, and climate change on Kalaallisut morphosyntax and especially on prototypically polysynthetic phenomena, such as noun incorporation. I am also interested in collaborating with local scholars on questions of acquisition and variation in the different Greenlandic languages.
Another of my research interests is heritage languages, which can provide interesting insights into the types of changes that occur in language shift scenarios and help us understand contact ecologies more generally. I am also interested in advocating for heritage speakers in our field and in the classroom, whether they are speakers of a majority language in a diaspora context or speakers of reclaimed Indigenous languages.
Centering heritage speaker perspectives in undergraduate linguistics education, in (Teaching) American Speech 99(2), to appear. (with Tran Truong)
I am currently working on a project examining the structural effects of ongoing language shift in northeastern Siberia. I focus primarily on the alignment and argument structure of Chukchi (Chukotko-Kamchatkan), and how these aspects of the language are changing due to increasing shift to Russian.
Incorporation as a grammaticalization pathway: Chukchi incorporating morphology in areal perspective, in Journal of Language Contact 17(1), to appear.
Folklore narratives on the toponymy of the Russian Far North (Based on the Yukaghir, Even, and Yakut languages), in Acta Borealia 40(2), 2023. (with Samona Kurilova, Irena Khokholova, and Boris Osipov) [DOI]
(Socio)linguistic outcomes of social reorganization in Chukotka, in The Siberian World, eds. Davidov, Ferguson, & Ziker, 2023.
Introduction: Local approaches to cultures of northeastern Siberia, in Sibirica 21(3), 2022. (introduction to special volume, co-edited with Marina Kysylbaikova) [DOI]
Knowing and remembering: Rethinking lexical recall as a measure of proficiency in Indigenous language communities, in Language Documentation & Conservation 16, 2022. (with Daria Boltokova, Maria J. Pupynina, and Lenore A. Grenoble)
Language variation in a shifting community: Different patterns of noun incorporation in Modern Chukchi, in the International Journal of Bilingualism 26(5), 2022. [DOI]
Teaching and learning indigenous languages of the Russian Federation, in Russian Language Journal 71(3), 2022. (with Hilah Kohen, Irina Sadovina, Tetyana Dzyadevych, Dylan Charter, Anna Gomboeva, Lenore A. Grenoble, and Rossina Soyan) [DOI]
Complexity and simplification in language shift, in Frontiers in Communication 6, 2021. (with Lenore A. Grenoble, Antonina Vinokurova, and Elena Nesterova) [DOI]
Evolving language contact and multilingualism in Northeastern Russia, in Russia in Asia, eds. Romaniello, Hacking, & Hardy, 2020.
Argument structure in language shift: Morphosyntactic variation and grammatical resilience in Modern Chukchi, University of Chicago dissertation, 2020.
Diminishing (typological) diversity in a Russian-Turkic contact zone, in Suvremena Lingvistika 45.87, 2019. (with Lenore A. Grenoble, Irena Khokholova, and Liudmila Zamorshchikova) [DOI]
Together with Lenore Grenoble, we are working on a reconstruction of Odessan Russian, a moribund variety of Russian once robustly-spoken in Odessa, Ukraine. The dialect has mainly been preserved as a collection of stereotypes associated with the speech of Russian Jews. Thus, the focus of this project is not merely a linguistic/grammatical reconstruction, but also a sociolinguistic one: determining which subsets of the population actually spoke the dialect and how it may have been used to index different social relations.
Reconstructing Non-Standard Languages: A socially-anchored approach (Table of Contents), John Benjamins, 2022. (with Lenore A. Grenoble)
Reconstructing sociolinguistic variation, in the Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 2, 2017. (with Lenore A. Grenoble) [DOI]
I am also interested in the historical circumstances of contact among the northeastern Siberian languages, particularly involving Chukchi. One of my research interests is the development of ergative case marking in the Chukotkan languages, and the extent to which contact with Siberian Yupik may have played a role in this change.
Alignment change in Chukotkan: Further exploration of the pathways to ergativity, in Diachronica 36(2), 2019. [DOI]
As part of my work on heritage languages, I have conducted experiments investigating changes in the perception and production of lexical pitch accent among heritage speakers of Lithuanian in Chicago.
I have also worked on Ninilchik Russian, a dialect of Russian spoken in Alaska, assisting with the preparation of a dictionary. My undergraduate thesis examined the contact-induced changes in Ninilchik Russian, as well as the effects of language attrition and shift in the second half of the 20th century.
The Linguistic Legacy of Russians in Alaska: Russian Contact and Linguistic Variation in Alaska, with Special Attention to Ninilchik Russian, University of Chicago B.A. Honors Thesis, 2012.
Collaborations
I am a member of the Arctic Linguistic Ecology Lab at the M.K. Ammosov North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk. Updates about the Lab's activities are available here.
I am a participant in the NSF-funded initiative to establish a community of scholars working in interdisciplinary fields in collaboration (convergently) with Indigenous communities. Read more about our work here.
