Since my dissertation, I have been wrestling with the issue of how phonology interacts with the order of coordinated constituents. My lab has undertaken new research in this area, shedding light and applying more rigorous standards to this set of questions.

Two papers in this vein have recently been accepted. “A Hmong Corpus with Elaborate Expression Annotations,” describes a corpus of Hmong Daw-Mong Leng Usenet posts with all elaborate expressions (ABAC or ABCB coordinate constructions) annotated. “Learning the Ordering of Coordinate Compounds and Elaborate Expressions in Hmong, Lahu, and Chinese” uses this and other data to investigate—using a range of machine learning techniques—what evidence is available to language learners acquiring the ordering generalizations that govern coordinate compounds and elaborate expressions in Hmong, Lahu, and Chinese.

This project is joint work with Chen Cui, Katherine Zhang, and Xinyu Zhang.

For more context, see my presentation from a talk at ETH Zürich.