Contact University of Pennsylvania Department of Linguistics 3401-C Walnut Street, Suite 300, C Wing Philadelphia, PA 19104 akkusf@sas.upenn.edu

I am currently a rising 5th year PhD student, ABD as of February 25, 2019, in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. My work is at the intersection of theoretical syntax and its interfaces with morphology and semantics, with a focus on endangered and un(der)studied languages. I study cross-dialectal variation in sentence structure, building primarily on data collected through fieldwork on un(der)documented languages.

I specialize in Arabic dialects—particularly the so-called peripheral varieties, Turkish, Mutki Zazaki and Cherokee. My advisor is Julie Anne Legate; I also work with David Embick and Florian Schwarz.

You can find more information about my work and interests in the Research page.

My current work includes

ergativity and argument indexing in Iranian languages

the syntax of (indirect) causatives, with a focus on (Sason) Arabic

the ontology of implicit arguments

the syntax of speech act participants, with a focus on vocatives

indexical shift in Turkish and Iranian languages

investigation of (the limits of) contact-induced syntactic changes