My undergraduate thesis was on the syntax of XIII Comuni Cimbrian, an endangered language spoken in Northern Italy. Cimbrian is a language of Middle German origin, that has been in a minority language context for the past several hundred years. My research provided evidence of an emerging dialect-internal fracture in the speed of syntactic change that is taking place in the language, particularly in the use of adjective ordering, negation, and resumptive subjects.
Last summer I worked at TedLab on an experiment to examine phonetic cues to boundaries in ambiguous sentences and their mappings to syntax. Work on the experiment and related issues will continue this year with Cornell's PLab.
Parallel projects include investigating the syntactic and semantic crosslinguistic properties of negative concord; a phonetic/phonological study of consonant harmony, particularly in Kazakh; and collecting odd examples of English preposition stranding hyper-corrections.