I am a second-year grad student working on my PhD in Linguistics at Rutgers. I'm primarily interested in phonology (and its interfaces with phonetics and morphology), signed languages, and Optimality Theory. This year I am pretending to be a syntactician while I work on my first qualifying paper (as described below).

If you want to know more about me, my CV [PDF] might be of interest.

(La)TeX users might enjoy TeXTabTool - a (La)TeX tabular generator I wrote with Jonathan North Washington.

Current Work

Some of my current and recent projects are listed below. For other selected work, see the research page.

Qualifying paper: The incognito nominal
Spanish, Dutch, and several other languages allow a construction in which an N (or slightly larger constituent) appears to be missing. I am examining the variable grammaticality of this construction when paired with a variety of determiner-like elements and modifiers. The project focuses on Spanish, with the additional goal of explaining crosslinguistic differences in allowable determiners and modifiers.
Handout from RULing IV talk: [PDF] [LaTeX]
Qualifying Paper Proposal [PDF] [LaTeX]

Undergrad course: Linguistics of signed languages
Over the summer of 2008 I designed a course on the linguistics of signed languages, focusing on phonology, syntax, and semantics, as well as Deaf arts and culture. The course uses data from several signed languages, especially ASL and Auslan, to combat many of the false assumptions about signed languages.

Phonetics/phonology interface in signed languages
In examining the phonetics/phonology interface, the majority of research has been conducted on spoken languages. Signed languages, though, clearly have different articulatory mechanisms than spoken ones. I am interested in how this difference can affect the phonetics/phonology interface - if it does at all.

Contact Information

Email: < abraver /æt/ rutgers.edu >
Mail: Aaron Braver
Linguistics Department
Rutgers University
18 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901

Personal Interests

I like computers. There, I said it. Stop laughing - computers are cool now. I also enjoy SciFi, especially Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, and Torchwood.