UCLA Language Materials Project
Research Assistant for the UCLA Language Materials Project, a project funded by the United States Department of Education. Entering language materials into a database, creating linguistic profiles for less commonly taught languages, including Greek and writing reports related to the availability of teaching materials for each language. 
 

Research on Malagasy Language Acquisition
(From the Linguistics Department Newsletter) 
In February 2004, Prof. Cecile Manorohanta of the Universite Nord in Madagascar visited our department for a month to pursue her research on language acquisition by Malagasy children.  She brought with her recordings and transcripts of sessions with three different children over an eight month period. A team consisting of Prof. Manorohanta, Profs. Ed Keenan and Nina Hyams, and two graduate students, Dimitris Ntelitheos and Eleni Christodoulou was set up to code the child data into a format for retrieval of information pertinent to questions currently being asked about child language acquisition in general. This work has so far resulted in three research papers, two presented at international conferences. 
The Malagasy data are especially valuable since Malagasy differs in several crucial ways from the European languages on which most studies of language acquisition have been based. In particular Malagasy does not make a distinction between finite and non-finite verb forms (Mary is eating versus Mary wants to eat). Further Malagasy, like Philippine languages, has a very rich voice system (many different kinds of "passive" verbs) and these forms are learned much earlier than passives in English. 
 

Field Work in Madagascar 
In May 2005 I was awarded the Yvonne and  Harry Lenart Travel Fellowship which enabled me to travel to Madagascar and collect data on Malagasy nominalizations and related issues. Malagasy has a rich inventory of different types of nominalizations which can provide insights into major theoretical problems in linguistic theory including the relation between the morphological shape of words to their syntactic properties, and the possibility of capturing the different distributional properties of words with syntactic rules alone, without refuge to a special morphological component of grammar. Some of the issues my research aims to address in this respect are: 
Why do different nominalizations exhibit different properties both in their internal syntactic structure (i.e. what elements they can contain) and their external distribution (i.e. what positions the phrases can occupy)?
How does Malagasy implement morphological means to express concepts that are expressed by independent words and phrases in English? 
How important is the process of nominalization in Malagasy and Austronesian in general and how do nominalizations in these languages differ from nominalizations in the better-studied Indo-European languages? 
Finally, what insights can the morphosyntax of Malagasy nominalizations bring to analyses of constituent structure in Malagasy and related languages?
 

Dissertation Research
In June 2005 I was awarded the Dissertation Year Fellowship in order to pursue further my work on Malagasy nominalizations and complete my dissertation. I am currently working on the structure of the Malagasy nominal domain, the strong parallelism between the nominal and clausal domains in the language, and how nominalizations can inform us on the more general properties of Malagasy clausal architecture. 

My work in this respect is based on two basic assumptions about the syntactic structure of nominalizations. Firstly, I assume that different properties of various nominalizations are derived from variation in merger height of nominalizing affixes. Higher attachment corresponds to the expression of more verbal properties (accusative object, adverbial modification)  while lower attachment corresponds to the expression of more nominal properties (genitive subject, adjectival modification and prepositional objects). A second assumption that I adopt is that all nominalizations are syntactic in nature and that their syntactic formation involves a structure that contains a determiner selecting a clausal string. This configuration has recently been assumed to represent the underlying structure of relative clauses (Kayne, 1994), and even common noun phrases (Koopman 2003). Data from Malagasy and other Austronesian languages provide evidence that this particular configuration can also be assumed to underlie nominalizations.