I present the first comprehensive overview of the A'ingae phonology, including descriptions of the language's phonemic inventory, phonotactics, prominent phonological rules, nasality and nasal spreading, stress, glottalization, their morphophonology, and aspects of clause-level prosody.

The phonology of A'ingae.  Language and Linguistics Compass 18(3), e12512. 2024. article

I describe and analyze aspects of A'ingae's morphophonology of stress and glottalization. I argue that morpheme-specific stress deletion cannot be captured representationally. I demonstrate that the phonological tier of the A'ingae glottal stop differs between two morphological domains and interacts with stress deletion, bearing out a new prediction of Cophonologies by Phase (Sande, Jenks, and Inkelas, 2020). I show that the patterns of stress and glottalization overwriting in nominalizations are sensitive to the morphosyntactic structure of the base, violating bracket erasure (Kiparsky, 1982).

Dominance is non-representational: Evidence from A'ingae verbal stress.  Phonology 38(4), pp. 611–650. 2021. article

Two grammars of A'ingae glottalization: A case for Cophonologies by Phase.  Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 42(2), pp. 437–491. 2024. article   ❧   Invited talk presented at the research seminar Atelier de phonologie, Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis. 2022. slides   ❧   Talk presented at the QP Fest, University of California, Berkeley. 2023. slides

Phasal strength in A'ingae classifying subordination.  In: Proceedings of the 2023 and 2024 Annual Meetings on Phonology 1(1). Ed. by Gérard Avelino, Merlin Balihaxi, Quartz Colvin, Vincent Czarnecki, Hyunjung Joo, Chenli Wang, Utku Zobarlar, Adam Jardine, and Adam McCollum. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. 2025. proceedings

Phonology grants no asylum: The inescapability of syntax in A'ingae dominance blocking.  Invited talk presented at the workshop Phonological domains and what conditions them, University of California, Berkeley. 2024. handout

I describe and analyze the A'ingae pluractional reduplicative suffix -ʔσ, which requires that the reduplicated form have the following shape: (ˈσ₁̆σ₂ʔ)σ₂. I model this behavior with a reduplicant-specific cophonology (e.g. Orgun, 1996), which consists of a ranking of independently motived constraints (Dąbkowski, 2023). This shows that A'ingae reduplication is phonologically optimizing.

A'ingae reduplication is phonologically optimizing.  In: Supplemental Proceedings of the 2022 Annual Meeting on Phonology. Ed. by Noah Elkins, Bruce Hayes, Jinyoung Jo, and Jian-Leat Siah. Washington, DC: Linguistic Society of America. 2023. proceedings poster

Some A'ingae words historically derived with otherwise preglottalized nominalizers show no glottalization today. I propose that these "exceptions" are reflexes of originally glottalized words, which underwent semantic shift and lost glottalization due to contamination from the glottalless majority.

Deglottalizing contamination in A'ingae historical derivatives.  In: Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 10(1), 5879. Washington, DC: Linguistic Society of America. 2025. proceedings

I describe and analyse two phenomena affecting diphthongs: postlabial raising (*ai > ɨi / P _) and postlabial rounding (/ae/ → [oe] / P _). The postlabial raising reflects a sequence of sound changes, whereby *ai first postlabially rounded and then unrounded (followed by replacement and paradigmatic leveling). The postlabial rounding of /ae/ results from its subsegmental make-up, ae = (a¹ a² e² e³), contributing a novel argument for the representations of Q-Theory (Inkelas and Shih, 2016, 2017).

Postlabial raising and paradigmatic leveling in A'ingae: A diachronic study from the field.  In: Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 8(1). 5428. Ed. by Patrick Farrell. Washington, DC: Linguistic Society of America. 2023. proceedings poster

A Q-Theoretic solution to A'ingae postlabial rounding.  Linguistic Inquiry, pp. 1–21. 2024. squib

I propose that a glottal stop -ʔ is the realization of T° when adjacent to the higher-order discourse feature [δ] (Bossi and Diercks, 2019; Mikkelsen, 2015), providing novel morphological evidence for a hierarchical arrangement of discourse features. I argue that in distanced conditionals, mental space distance is conveyed with the semantically bleached similative marker.

Teasing the A'ingae discourse and conditional marking apart.  Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas. 2025. handout   ❧   In: NELS 55: Proceedings of the Fifty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the North Eastern Linguistic Society. Amherst, Massachusetts: GLSA (Graduate Linguistics Student Association), Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. To appear. proceedings poster

Conditional constructions in A'ingae.  Manuscript. University of California, Berkeley. 2021. manuscript

I analyze A'ingae second-position clitics as matrix clausal C-heads, demonstrating that—despite its apparent non-configurationality—A'ingae has a structured left periphery. I describe A'ingae pied-piping structures and account for them using Cable's (2010) Q-particle theory.

A'ingae second-position clitics are matrix C-heads.  In: Proceedings of the 25th Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics. To appear. proceedings

A'ingae pied-piping: A Q-based analysis.  Paper presented at the 4th Symposium on Amazonian Languages, University of California, Berkeley. 2022. handout

I identify the "nominal negative" suffix -a nn, which obligatorily attaches to noun phrase-internal functional heads that nominalize negated predicates. I propose that -a nn expresses agreement with the Neg(ative) feature on T. Therefore, I document the first case of agreement with polarity on nominalizers to date.

Polarity agreement in A'ingae nominalizations.  Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, Denver, CO. 2023. handout

In a collaborative project with Scott AnderBois, we describe and analyze different uses of the A'ingae apprehensional morpheme -sa'ne appr. We put forth a formal account of rationale and precautioning clauses, which captures language-internal asymmetries and typological trends within this semantic domain. We propose a typological framework for describing and comparing apprehensional synchrony and diachrony.

The apprehensional domain in A'ingae (Cofán),  as first author, with Scott AnderBois. In: Apprehensional constructions in a cross-linguistic perspective. Ed. by Marine Vuillermet, Martina Faller, and Eva Schultze Berndt. Studies in Diversity Linguistics. Language Science Press. To appear. chapter

A'ingae =sa'ne 'appr' and the semantic typology of apprehensional adjuncts,  as equal author, with Scott AnderBois. In: Proceedings of the 30th Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference, pp. 43–62. Ed. by Joseph Rhyne, Kaelyn Lamp, Nicole Dreier, and Chloe Kwon. Washington, DC: Linguistic Society of America. 2020. proceedings

Rationale and precautioning clauses: Insights from A'ingae,  as first author, with Scott AnderBois. Journal of Semantics 40(2-3), pp. 391–425. 2024. article

The semantics and expression of apprehensional modality,  as second author, with Scott AnderBois. Language and Linguistics Compass 19(1), e70002. 2025. article

I have documented A'ingae in the indigenous communities of Dureno and Sinangoé (Sucumbíos, Ecuador) and remotely. I am depositing over 57 hours of oral narrative video recordings (of which over 16 hours have been transcribed and translated) as well as elicitation data, including fieldnotes and over 220 hours of audio recordings.

A'ingae language documentation,  as equal author, with Justin Bai, Kalinda Pride, and Nicholas Tomlin. Poster presented at Summer Research Symposium, Brown University, Providence, RI. 2017. poster

A'ingae (Ecuador and Colombia) – Language snapshot.  Language Documentation and Description 20, pp. 1–12. 2021. article

A'ingae field materials. 2020-19. California Language Archive, Survey of California and Other Indian Languages. University of California, Berkeley. collection