CV

Assistant Professor of Practice

Department of Linguistics, University of Arizona

Teaching courses primarily in the online _Master's in Human Language Technology_ program

• Linguistics 123 “Intro to Mathematical Approaches to Language”
• Linguistics 503 “Foundations of Syntax”
• Linguistics 508 “Computational Techniques for Linguists”
• Linguistics 529 “Human Language Technology 1”
• Linguistics 531 “Human Language Technology 2: Information Retrieval”
• Linguistics 538 “Computational Linguistics”
• Linguistics 539 “Statistical Natural Language Processing”
• Linguistics 581 “Advanced Computational Linguistics”

Curriculum developer and instructor

Sino-Tibetan Institute, Yunnan Normal University, in partnership with SIL International

Develop and teach an MA-level course as part of a joint MA program in Chinese Minority Languages and Linguistics, “语音学与音系学” [“Phonetics and Phonology”]; all course materials and instruction in Mandarin

Linguistic annotator

Unbabel

Annotating linguistic error type & severity in video captions

Linguistics Consultant Associate Director for Academic Affairs (other roles as below)

SIL International

My work in SIL included basic linguistics and language documentation, as well as administrative supervision for academic support

• Linguistics Consultant (Jul 2010 to present, continuing as a volunteer)
• Associate Director for Academic Affairs, regional (Sept 2018 to Apr 2022)
• Linguistics Coordinator, regional (Mar 2013 to Aug 2018)
• Archive curator, regional (Apr 2013 to Aug 2016)
• Community Project Linguist (Nov 2005 to May 2015)

Lead instructor

Oregon Summer Institute of Linguistics

Linguistics 454/554 “Advanced Phonology”

TA Coordinator and instructor; Prof. Anoop Mahajan, faculty advisor

Office of Instructional Development, for the Department of Linguistics, UCLA

Linguistics 495b “College Teaching of Linguistics”

Teaching Assistant / Teaching Associate

Department of Linguistics, UCLA

• Linguistics 1 “Introduction to the Study of Language”
• Linguistics 20 “Introduction to Linguistics”
• Linguistics 110 “Historical Linguistics”

Linguistic consultant

Tellme Networks

Developing phonetic database of street names for TTS & ASR

English instructor

Jordan's Language Center

• “Conversational English”
• “Business English”
• “Basic English for Children”

Workshop facilitator & assistant facilitator

CoLang 2024

Facilitated and supported several workshops

• Fieldworks Language Explorer 1 & 2, co-facilitator
• Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages, assistant
• Speech Recognition for Indigenous Languages, assistant

Consulting editor

Journal of Language Survey Reports

PhD

University of California, Los Angeles

Linguistics

Advisor: Pamela Munro

Committee members: Daniel Büring, Carson Schütze, Henning Andersen

Thesis title: "Resultatives, Derived Statives, and Lexical Semantic Structure"

MA

University of California, Los Angeles

Linguistics

Advisor: Pamela Munro

Committee members: Carson Schütze, Timothy Stowell

Thesis title: "The Stative s- Morpheme in Pima"

BA

University of Arizona

Linguistics

BS

University of Arizona

Physics with honors

Advisor: Randall Richardson

Thesis title: "Modeling the Interaction of North American and Failed Rift Stresses: The Role of Rift Geometry"

Dynamic Language Infrastructure – Documenting Endangered Languages Grant (co-recipient with Amy Fountain, Aresta Tsosie-Paddock, and Rolando Coto-Solano)

NSF / NEH

Grant title: “Collaborative Research: Advancing Indigenous Language Technologies” (2347147/2347148)

2023-4 Early Career Teaching Award

U of A College of Social & Behavioral Science

In recognition of exceptional teaching and outstanding instructional excellence

Dissertation Year Fellowship

UCLA Graduate Division

Helmut Esau Student Paper Award

Linguistic Association of the Southwest

for the paper “Dispersion in the Vowel System of Pima”

Phillips Fund for North Native American Research, research grant (co-recipient with Marcus Smith)

American Philosophical Society

Grant title: “Aspects of the Grammar of Pima”

Research Mentorship, under Prof. Pamela Munro

UCLA

Research grant (co-recipient with Marcus Smith)

UCLA Institute of American Cultures & UCLA American Indian Studies Center

Grant title: “Syntax and Semantics of Pima Verbs”

Summer Research Mentorship, under Prof. Pamela Munro

UCLA

Pauley Foundation Fellowship

UCLA

Outstanding Senior

University of Arizona CDepartment of Physics

UA Dean of Science review committee, undergraduate representative

Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society

Flinn Foundation Scholarship

National Merit Scholarship

International Baccalaureate diploma

Eagle Scout rank

Two-part negation in Yang Zhuang

Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society

The negation system of Yang Zhuang includes two standard negators and an aspectual negator, all of which occur before the verb; the negator meiz nearly always co-occurs with a clause-final particle nauq, which can also stand as a single-word negative response to a question. Although it is tempting to analyze nauq with a meaning beyond simply negation, this is difficult to do synchronically. Comparison with neighboring Tai languages suggests that this construction represents one stage in Jespersen's Cycle, whereby a negator is augmented with a second element, after which the second element becomes associated with negation; this element subsequently replaces the historical negator. A Jespersen's Cycle analysis also explains the occurrence of nauq as a preverbal negator in some neighboring Zhuang languages.

A sociolinguistic survey of the Dejing Zhuang dialect area

SIL Electronic Survey Reports

This report presents the results of a dialect intelligibility survey carried out in 2008 in the southwestern part of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China. The Zhuang varieties surveyed in this area have been grouped into the Central branch of Taic languages. This survey of nineteen locations across the dialect area found evidence from intelligibility, from similarity of wordlists and from speaker attitudes, for assigning them to at least two distinct ISO 639-3 language codes, [zyg] “Yang Zhuang” and [zgm] “Minz Zhuang”. Language development efforts among most of the remaining one-sixth of the Zhuang population of the Dejing area would require other varieties as a basis, but for many of these varieties, Jingxi Yang could likely still be used as a means of widespread communication.

Dispersion in the vowel system of Pima

UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics

This is a pilot study of the phonetic variation of vowels due to stress and syllable type in Pima, a dialect of O’odham. O’odham, along with several other Uto-Aztecan languages, has a five vowel system which appears unevenly distributed in two ways: its only front vowel is high, and it includes three high-back or high-mid vowels. This arrangement of canonical vowels appears not to reflect the influence of a drive for maximal dispersion of canonical vowels, something which has been argued to account for the frequency and type of vowel inventories cross-linguistically. Several properties of the allophonic variation observed in Pima, however, can be explained by appealing to just such a drive to maximize acoustic distinctness. Factors besides maximal distinctness must also be involved in controlling this distribution, however, as evidenced by the relative stability of this vowel system among Uto-Aztecan languages.

Review of Beth Levin and Malka Rappaport Hovav, Argument Realization (2005)

SIL Electronic Book Reviews

This book is composed of an introduction which lays out the major questions regarding argument realization: Which elements of meaning are relevant for the mapping from lexical semantics to morphosyntactic expression? What should lexical semantic representations be like in order to encode this information? How is the mapping from lexical semantics to syntax carried out? What effect do factors apart from the semantics of the verb, like semantic weight of an argument (i.e., its grammatical complexity), or information structure and discourse context, have on the realization of a predicate and its arguments? To what extent are semantic determinants of argument structure "lexical", and to what extent not?

Resultatives, derived statives, and lexical semantic structure

UCLA dissertation

This dissertation examines two resultative suffixes in Pima whose properties are relevant for the hypothesis that the meanings of words in natural language have structure. The passive resultative suffix –s is canonically interpreted as a resultative proper; verbs with this suffix typically express the condition which results from an event of the type denoted by the unsuffixed verb. Certain verbs with this suffix, however, receive a derived stative interpretation, where the condition which they express need not be the result of any event at all. The possessive resultative suffix –kc, in contrast, has a more restricted distribution; verbs with this suffix receive either a resultative or derived stative interpretation, where the subject of the suffixed verb is responsible for maintaining this condition. While several analyses of the Pima resultatives are considered here, the most economical analysis of the distribution of interpretations which Pima resultatives receive involves monotonically adding semantic components in order to build the meaning of both eventive verbs and resultatives. This analysis is presented within the framework of Distributed Morphology, where the semantic components of these verbs are associated with a number of abstract syntactic elements. Since these resultatives are temporally stative, an introductory chapter explores what temporal stativity is and what it indicates about a predicate; another introductory chapter discusses published analyses of resultatives in Chichewa and German, which show several quite different ways that a morphologically and semantically derived predicate may be given this property.

The stative s- morpheme in Pima

UCLA

This thesis describes the behavior of a prefix which occurs on adjectives and verbs in the O'odham languages of Pima and Papago, Tepiman languages of Southern Uto-Aztecan, spoken in Arizona and Mexico. This prefix, whose phonological form is s-, shows a moderate, but not perfect,correlation with stative lexical aspect. This paper models the behavior of the s- prefix within the non-Lexicalist framework of Distributed Morphology, treating the s- as the expression of a grammaticized semantic feature [+ STATIVE ].

The “s”-ence of Pima

Santa Barbara Papers in Linguistics, Vol 13. Proceedings from the Fifth Workshop on American Indigenous Languages

This paper examines the morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of a verbal and adjectival prefix in Pima. One puzzling morpheme shared by Pima and Tohono O'odham is a prefix with the phonological form [s], which occurs in certain syntactic environments on many adjectives and a small set of verbs. The best generalization in Pima is that this morpheme occurs only on predicates with stative lexical aspect, but is also sensitive to polarity (ie, negation) and shows a significant number of lexical exceptions.

Advancing Indigenous Language Technology

The Advancing Indigenous Language Technologies (AILT) Working Group is coalition of academic and community language workers and scholars joining efforts to support the advancement of language technologies that serve Indigenous language community needs. AILT works to support language technology development that meets community needs, aligns with community values, and respects communities’ rights to data sovereignty.

• Workshops at SAIL 2024
• Workshops at CoLang 2024
• Workshops with individual language communities