I work on various phonological topics (the formation of active classes, the development of phonological rules, sonorant phonology, local and long-distance consonant interactions, the formal structure of phonological representations) and on mathematical models of language change and dialect geography. Uniting these, one of my major current directions is the relationship between geographically-sensitive variation in the structure of related phonological rules and the diachronic pathway of phonologisation.
My PhD thesis, Similarity and representations in sonorant phonology (December 2018) was supervised by Yuni Kim and Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero . The title was a little misleading; the thesis deals with the nature of class formation and phonologisation in synchrony and diachrony, and with the role that parameters like similarity can play in the organisation of processes of analogical generalisation. There's also a subsidiary focus therein on the Turkic languages, in which I have a particular interest. Any day now
I maintain an involvement with the ESRC-funded project Investigating the diffusion of morphosyntactic innovations using social media (‘Tweetolectology’) , on which I was the RA 2017–2020, with David Willis , Adrian Leemann , and Tamsin Blaxter . Our interest is in the spatial patterning of morphosyntactic variation in British English, Welsh, Norwegian-Swedish-Danish, and Turkish; we're building large, geographically-rich corpora of Twitter posts in those languages, and using them to answer questions about d