About Me

I'm a PhD candidate of linguistics at UC San Diego. My theoretical interests concern how phonology interfaces with other facets of the wider grammar. In particular, I study tone and its many uses in grammar, including its representation as well as its interaction with morphosyntax. Since 2018, I have been studying the Toussian languages (Niger Congo, potentially Gur/Mabia) of southwest Burkina Faso, which have complex tonal systems with intricate syntax-prosody interactions. My dissertation is a grammar of Northern Toussian.

I also study musical surrogate languages, which are ways of encoding speech through musical instruments. Northern Toussian has a musical surrogate language played on a type of xylophone called a balafon, where the tones as well as aspects of the syllable structure are encoded. I describe this system in Struthers-Young (2022)