I am a postdoctoral research associate in the University of Maryland Department of Linguistics. My research interests include theoretical syntax, Palauan and other Austronesian languages, linguistic fieldwork and language documentation, and computational linguistics (primarily information retrieval and spoken dialogue applications).
Fun new email address:
! 
ju-st.in
Contrary to popular belief, I am not Canadian — I was born in Ohio. In English, my name is pronounced ['ʤʌs.tɪn 'nuw.ʤɚ], but it's [ʒys.'tẽ ny.'ʒe] in French. When I'm not doing linguistics, I enjoy reading pretentious novels and unpretentious magazines, discussing complicated things in simple ways, having fun with good friends, and doing just about anything with boisterous, intelligent people. I have lived in Montréal, Micronesia, the South of France, the Deep South, former East Germany, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Watching sports on TV makes me bored, but I like going to games in real life. I love anything hot or cold: e.g., beach days, ski trips, spicy Indian food, popsicles, celebrities, and eskimos. I also enjoy unpredictability and therefore both appreciate and eschew spontaneity, depending on the situation. I become extremely happy during the Olympics, and the rest of my life takes a backseat. I randomly have semi–official certifications in bartending, scuba diving, and German fluency. I've never owned a car, and I don't know how to ride a bicycle. I played trumpet for ten years and then abruptly stopped. I once played an ensemble part in Federico García Lorca's Bodas de Sangre even though I did not understand my Spanish lines. I love rabbits. I don't know what else to write.
Even more about me... (Private)
Available online in PDF format [approx. 1.9 MB].
This dissertation addresses two fundamental, difficult questions in linguistic theory. The morphological question involves the formal status of verbs as "words," while the syntactic question is concerned with how verb phrases are constructed. Both questions arise in frameworks, including Distributed Morphology and recent versions of Minimalism, in which the material that constitutes a verb is distributed over multiple syntactic heads. To address these questions, I develop a theory of the verbal complex of Palauan, an Austronesian language spoken by approximately 15,000 people in the Republic of Palau and elsewhere. The data covers new empirical domains and is drawn both from my original fieldwork and from sources of naturally occurring data.
I begin by exploring the nature of grammatical relations in Palauan (subjects, direct objects, and possessors), concluding that they are instantiated by the operation Agree. The morphosyntax of accusative DPs also suggests that licensing heads that trigger Agree may have other features bundled with them, like tense, aspect, or mood. Next, Palauan phrasal idioms reveal a locality restriction on their subparts for which I propose a constraint that refers to linearized strings. If the analysis is correct, Palauan idioms provide a new type of evidence for a post-syntactic component of the grammar. Then, from one morphologically uniform class of intransitive verbs and adjectives, I conclude that there are three distinct syntactic subclasses — passive verbs, unaccusative verbs, and stative adjectives. The result bears on the nature of the relations between functional heads and their complements, which I take to be something like feature-unification (rather than category-selection). Finally, the internal structure of resultative adjective phrases suggests that Palauan words are derived (at least partially) syntactically, where a syntactic head can merge with a phrasal XP but form a morphophonological word with just a proper subpart of that XP.
The overall picture that emerges is that while the (morpho)syntax of Palauan appears initially baroque, it is not tremendously different from that of other languages. Still, its sometimes unusual properties can help shed light on long-standing questions about similar phenomena in better-studied languages.
It's ready. Advances in Comparative Germanic Syntax (which I co-edited with Artemis Alexiadou, Jorge Hankamer, Thomas McFadden, and Florian Schäfer) is now available for purchase via the Benjamins website, Amazon, and (probably not) your local bookstore. Coming soon to an academic library near you. Take a peek inside on Google Books.
Morphological Syncretism in Palauan Passives, Unaccusatives, and Statives. A large class of intransitive verbs in Palauan is formed from stems which are prefixed with me-. There has been much debate in the descriptive literature about the argument structure of such verbs, i.e., whether they are passive or unaccusative (or something else). I analyze these verbs as having a uniformly unaccusative syntax (i.e., their sole DP argument is selected as a complement of the root or "big" V) and merging subsequently with one of three homophonous "little" v heads: passive v, unaccusative v, and stative v. I present syntactic diagnostics to identify which of the three subtypes a particular intransitive me- verb belongs to, and I propose that there is no formal selectional relationship between the v heads and the RootP/VP it merges with. Handout from AFLA 17.
Syntactic Structure Inside Palauan Resultatives. What descriptive grammarians have called resulting state verbs in Palauan are shown to have syntactic structure beneath the word level. I examine evidence that while the minimal constituents that contain resulting state verbs and their argument(s) have the internal structure of eventive VPs/vPs, they have the distribution and morphosyntactic reflexes of stative APs/aPs. I propose an analysis in which category-neutral roots combine with their arguments and later merge with a resultative a morpheme (realized as the -(e)l- infix), which may be construed as a "stativizer" that existentially quantifies the event argument of a vP that also contains a target state component (possibly along the lines of Kratzer 2000: 391, ex. 14). Handout from PLC 34.
Aspect in Palauan vP-Internal Syntax: Evidence from Passives. An in-depth investigation into Palauan me- and o- verbs concludes that a subclass of them may be analyzed as passive verbs in Palauan. Evidence for the promotion of the theme DP to subject position comes from three tests: availability of quantifier float, the ability to be co-referent with the causee in Palauan's periphrastic causative construction, and wh-agreement. The structure of passives provides evidence against the analysis of transitive vP of Nuger (2007; see below), and a new analysis is constructed using concepts from Minimalism and Distributed Morphology in Nuger 2008 (Variations on the Palauan Theme).
Palauan's Case-Licensing System. Predicative aspect (i.e. telicity) directly influences the licensing of case on Palauan internal arguments. Verbs morphologically marked as telic bear inflectional suffixes that agree in person, number, and animacy with the direct object, which is the “measurer” of the event (in the sense of Tenny 1987 et seq., Arad 1998). The direct object DP itself is not case-marked. On the other hand, the direct objects of atelic verbs exhibit differential object marking (see Aissen 2003 for extensive discussion). A Minimalist analysis is presented in Nuger 2007 (The Case of Objects), which I have revised in Nuger 2008 (see above). See also Nuger 2009 (On Downward-Entailing Existentials and Differential Object Marking in Palauan).
A CLIR-based Readability Classifier for Chinese. This project utilizes semantically comparable corpora in Chinese and other languages, as well as cross-lingual information retrieval techniques. These, in combination with established readability classification algorithms developed for other languages (e.g. LIX, Flesch-Kincaid, etc.), allow for the classification of texts using familiar indices even in languages for which the algorithms were not designed. The framework is presented in detail in Kirchner, Nuger, and Zhang 2009 (An Extensible Crosslinguistic Readability Framework)
Discontiguous Reduplication. Ulu Muar Malay, Semai, and Nakanai each contain patterns of reduplication in which the monosyllabic reduplicant prefix corresponds with segments at both the left and right edge of the base (at the expense of medial segments). A unified Optimality–Theoretic analysis (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004) for the patterns in the three languages is offered in Nuger 2006 (Discontiguous Reduplication). Shorter, revised version that focuses on the Malay data coming soon in Mercado et al. (in press), Austronesian Contributions to Linguistic Theory. Amsterdam: Benjamins. [manuscript]
Ling 311: Syntax I (Fall 2010). Instructor. University of Maryland.
Ling 113: Syntax II (Spring 2010). Teaching assistant for Prof. James McCloskey. UC Santa Cruz.
Ling 52: Syntax I (Winter 2010). Teaching assistant for Prof. Jorge Hankamer. UC Santa Cruz.
Ling 52: Syntax I (Fall 2008). Teaching assistant for Prof. Sandra Chung. UC Santa Cruz.
Ling 50: Introduction to Linguistics (Summer 2008). Instructor of record. UC Santa Cruz.
Ling 181: Structure of Romance Languages (Winter 2008). Teaching assistant for Prof. James Isaacs. UC Santa Cruz.
Ling 20: Introduction to Linguistics (Spring 2007). Teaching assistant for Prof. Geoffrey Pullum. UC Santa Cruz.
Ling 80V: Structure of the English Vocabulary (Fall 2005). Teaching assistant for Prof. Junko Ito. UC Santa Cruz.