Steven Foley

My research revolves around morphosyntactic complexity and variation. As a psycholinguist, I am interested in the subconscious strategies comprehenders use to process words and sentences, especially in light of crosslinguistic grammatical diversity. As a syntactician, I am interested in the formal representation of these diverse patterns, and theories linking grammatical competence to performance phenomena. I specialize in Georgian, a language of the Caucasus, leveraging its complex case and agreement patterns to shed light on these issues. I have also worked on animacy and clitic pronoun movement in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec (an indigenous language of Mexico), and on individual variation in the processing of singular they in English.