I am a professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park. I also work with several research stations and labs, which you can find more about here.

My research interests are as follows:

  • Syntactic theory
  • Language universals and the range of cross-linguistic variation
  • Heritage languages and their bearing on linguistic theory

I work on various syntactic topics including long-distance dependencies, verb phrase structure, ergativity, and verb-initial orders I have done primary work on a variety of languages: languages of the Caucasus, Austronesian, and Mayan languages. My research also includes structural properties of language spoken by unbalanced bilinguals: what is now known as heritage language.