Dr Steven Kaye

I am a postdoctoral research fellow in the Surrey Morphology Group (SMG), a research centre hosted by the School of Literature and Languages. Before joining this group, I taught linguistics at UCL and at the University of Oxford, where I also completed a doctorate in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology.

My current work, under the auspices of the AHRC-funded project ‘External Agreement’, looks primarily at the grammatical organization of several languages belonging to the diverse but little-known Nakh-Daghestanian family, spoken in a mountainous region of the Northern Caucasus. In a previous project, funded by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche, I worked on Northern Talyshi, an Iranian minority language spoken in Azerbaijan. For this project I glossed and translated into English a collection of folk tales compiled by a native speaker of the language.

My doctoral and Master’s level research projects investigated different aspects of the development of the verb system from the unattested ancestors of Latin through to its various daughter languages, including lesser-known varieties such as Romansh. My doctorate looked in particular at the morphological phenomenon of heteroclisis, in which a word seems ‘unsure’ which other words in the lexicon it ought to pattern with.