I do not study languages; I study parts of the human brain that generate and perceive speech. I use human speech as evidence for my theories of phonological modules. In fact, I use human non-speech, too. (More on that below).
Confusingly, linguists often make it seem like we’re interested in languages. Maybe some are; I’m not. From time to time, I might lazily say “In French, {blah blah}”, but I’m really saying “There is a human who produced speech and he says he speaks ‘French’ (whatever that means), and here’s some evidence from data I elicited from him.”
So, to be clear, ‘languages’ is not a scientific term; ‘phonological module’ is. So, I work on phonological modules, not languages.
You can read about the difference between cognition and ‘languages’ in:
Here’s a relevant talk I gave (with video and audio):
So which languages do I study?
With the above in mind, I have tended to rely on speakers of particular ‘languages’ to provide evidence for my theories.
Most recently, I have elicited data from speakers of Nevisian creole with Patrik Bye.
I’ve also worked with speakers of Gujarati, Nauruan, and Rarotongan.
I’ve also worked on glossolalia, though I ran out of money to complete that research, so it’s going very slowly.
My students have also conducted fieldwork with speakers of many other languages. For example, Petr Staroverov worked on Tundra Nenets, Shu-hao Shih worked on Gujarati and Piuma Paiwan, and Eileen Blum worked with Irish Gaelic speakers.
Māori
In many publications, I report evidence from Māori speakers. Many Māori speakers grow up in New Zealand (where I grew up), though many also grew up in Australia. Here are some relevant articles:
de Lacy, Paul (2009). Phonological evidence. In Steve Parker (ed.). Phonological argumentation: Essays on evidence and motivation. Equinox Publications, ch.2.
• Has a short discussion of Māori loanword phonology.
de Lacy, Paul (2004). Maximal Words and the Māori passive. In John McCarthy (ed.) Optimality Theory in phonology: A reader. Blackwell, pp. 495-512.
and the longer 2003 version.
• These two articles are about the famous Māori passive allomorphy, and the gerund. They discuss Māori syllable structure, foot structure, and PrWd structure.
de Lacy, Paul (2003). Constraint universality and prosodic phrasing in Māori. In Angela Carpenter, Andries Coetzee, and Paul de Lacy (eds.) Papers in Optimality Theory II. UMOP 26. Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications, pp.59-79. ROA 561.
• Discusses prosodic phrasing and declarative and focus intonation in Māori.
de Lacy, Paul (2001). Predicate nominals in Māori, Minimalist Syntax Archive #179.
• About predicate nominals like “John is a teacher” and equatives “John is the man” in Māori. It argues that NP/DP predicates end up in the same place as D-linked wh-words, lending support to Sproat’s original analysis of VSO order as involving predicate movement to an A’ position.
There’s an earlier attempt (de Lacy 1996 Putting Maori modifiers in their place).
and
de Lacy, Paul (2017). Circumscriptive haplologizing reduplicants. In Heidi Quinn, Diane Massam, and Lisa Matthewson (eds). Linguistic Travels in Time and Space: Festschrift for Liz Pearce. Wellington Working Papers in Linguistics (WWPL) 23: 41-52. ISSN 2230-4681
• Looks at a morphological phenomenon in Māori which involves the lengthening of an initial vowel in trisyllabic words. I analysize it as a type of morphological haplology: where a phonologically contentless morpheme coincides with part of the word and forces a prosodic boundary in it.
de Lacy, Paul (1998). A cooccurence restriction in Maori. Te Reo (Journal of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand) 40: 10-44.
• Looks at cooccurrence restrictions on labials in Māori. Contains some now outdated notions of feature underspecification.
de Lacy, Paul (1996). Circumscription revisited: an analysis of Maori reduplication, Rutgers Optimality Archive #133.
• Analyzes the seven different reduplication patterns of Māori.