I study how languages change when they come into contact, and what language contact can tell us about language emergence. I'm particularly interested in multilingual decolonial and immigrant contexts, and I focus on Malayalam (a Dravidian language which is an official language in Kerala, India, and an official language of my family in Minnesota, United States). 

In my main area of research I use experimental methods to explore syntactic typology, particularly in the domain of constituent order (though also in the realm of variation in island phenomena). With collaborators, I'm working on translated replications of experiments from my dissertation, in which I introduced a cross-linguistically valid operational measure of flexibility in constituent order.

We have ongoing or recently completed projects on Avar (Matt Zaslansky), English, Korean (Dayoung Kim and Gyeongnam Kim), Malayalam, and Spanish (Lorenzo Garciá-Amaya and Nicholas Henriksen) so far, with more to come!

I'm also exploring contact effects at the word level, considering how bottom-up approaches to language contact and metalinguistic perceptions of language boundaries can account for loanword (non)adaptation. 

Finally, Corrine Occhino, Lynn Hou, Anne Charity-Hudley, Hayley Heaton, Dominique Canning, Marjorie Herbert, and I have been asking about harassment, bias, and negative climate in linguistics and related fields via an international survey. You can find some of our results, along with resources, actions people can take to improve their spheres of influence, and some powerful testimonials, at linguistsurvey.com.