About me
I am a linguist who conducts research in the fields of phonology, morphology, historical linguistics, linguistic typology, and language documentation. I take a usage-based approach to explain linguistic structure, including historical, social, communicative, and cognitive factors. I am currently an assistant professor in the University of Oregon Department of Linguistics.
My work is focused on languages of the eastern Himalayan region, including Rma (also called Qiang), Tibetan, and Rgyalrongic languages. I am the son of English teachers and spent most of my childhood living in Sichuan, China. I developed an interest in Tibeto-Burman languages through friendships I made with native speakers while attending Chinese public school. I have been involved with collaborative, community-based documentation of Rma since 2006.
I have received grants for documentation of endangered languages from the National Geographic Society, the Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Endangered Language Documentation Programme, and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH). I have also worked as an independent contractor for the Smithsonian CFCH as a language sustainability specialist and I have been an instructor at the Sino-Tibetan Linguistics Research and Methodology workshops co-sponsored by the Smithsonian CFCH and Nankai University since 2016.
My research has been published in journals such as Diachronica, Folia Linguistica Historica, Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, Linguistic Typology, Language & Linguistics, Transactions of the Philological Society, The Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, The Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, Himalayan Linguistics, and Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area. I also have published collections in the Ralph Rinzler Archives at the Smithsonian CFCH and also with the Endangered Languages Archive.
My dissertation, the verbal morphology of Yonghe Qiang: an eastern Himalayan language was completed in Spring 2021. The thesis is a study of the phonological and morphological properties of verbs in the Yonghe variety of Qiang. This dissertation takes a corpus-based approach based on a collection of natural and connected speech. I analyze the verbal constructions in the corpus, and pursue functional (typological, historical, and interactional) approaches toward an explanation of those structures. These approaches include both qualitative and quantitative methodologies.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2456-5025