Research Expertise and Interest

phonological theory, phonetics/phonology interface, historical phonology, Slavic, Turkic, Uralic

Research Description

Darya (Dasha) Kavitskaya is a Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and in the Department of Linguistics. Her research is focused on the mental representation of sound systems and on how phonology can inform us about the nature of the Language faculty and the fundamental human cognitive capacity for Language. Research topics she has worked on most extensively are contrast preservation and loss (i.e., how the information about contrast is encoded in the grammar and preserved (or not) over time), opacity (i.e., situations when the consequences of a phonological process cannot be determined solely by reference to surface structure), and various issues connected to syllable structure (i.e., the cross-linguistic tendencies and the language-specific patterns of syllable formation). The phonological phenomena she is particularly interested in with respect to these research topics are palatalization and vowel harmony. Areally, her work is concentrated on the phonological issues in Slavic, Turkic, and Uralic. She has also published on languages outside of these language families, such as Greek and Hittite.