Projects

The project that I’m currently busiest with is a study of the typology of borrowing of adpositions and other case-markers. A three-year project (2013-2016) funded by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF 248/13), the goal of this research is to understand the cross-linguistic patterning of contact-induced change involving adpositions and case-marking. While the project has officially only just begun, colleagues and I have already held a thematic workshop on the topic at the 2013 meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in Split. We have submitted a book proposal for a thematic volume, Adpositional Systems in Contact.  Other ongoing projects involve research on contact-induced change in transitivity and valency patterns (with Sebastian Richter), long-term and cyclical grammatical change in Coptic-Egyptian (with Stéphane Polis), and case, agreement, and information structure (with Giorgio Iemmolo).
Also under consideration for funding are two projects dealing with language change. The first, in collaboration with Götz Keydana (Göttingen), is a cross-linguistic, cross-domain look at the general mechanisms of language change. The second, with Sebastian Richter (Leipzig), deals with contact-induced changes related to valency and transitivity in Coptic.