ABOUT ME
I am a fifth year PhD student in the linguistics department at Rutgers University. I am interested mainly in computational phonology. My dissertation uses a formal language theory approach to investigate the computational complexity of vowel harmony patterns over multi-tiered autosegmental representations.
Outside of academia, I also enjoy working with horses and medieval armored combat. I have ridden and trained off-the-track thoroughbreds in the hunter/jumper discipline for over ten years. In the year before I started grad school I began to learn heavy armored combat in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) and I soon discovered that I love to fight with pole weapons, particularly glaive and axe.
RECENT PAPERS
DISSERTATION PROPOSAL
Blum, Eileen (2019). Dissertation Proposal. Ms. Rutgers University
I will investigate the computational complexity of vowel harmony. I analyze vowel harmony as a phonotactic restrictions and determine whether a variety of patterns can be captured using forbidden substructure constraints over multi-tiered autosegmental representations. In addition, I propose that vowel harmony can result from either spreading or agreement and harmony via agreement does not require correspondence.
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Committee: Adam Jardine (Chair), Bruce Tesar, Akinbiyi Akinlabi
QUALIFYING PAPER 2
Blum, Eileen (2018). On the locality of vowel harmony over multi-tiered autosegmental representations. Ms. Rutgers University
My second qualifying paper evaluates the locality of multi-tiered autosegmental representations using forbidden substructure constraints, following Jardine (2017), for surface representations of vowel harmony patterns.
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Committee: Adam Jardine (chair), Bruce Tesar, Simon Charlow
QUALIFYING PAPER 1
Blum, Eileen (2018). Allophony-driven stress in Munster Irish. Ms. Rutgers University
My first qualifying paper investigates the acoustics of stress in Munster Irish, specifically with regards to syllables containing the vowel-consonant sequence [ax]. I analyzed acoustic data from a single speaker to provide new evidence for metrical theories that have been proposed to account for this dialect's unique stress pattern.
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Committee: Paul de Lacy (chair), Akinbiyi Akinlabi, Adam Jardine, Joseph Casillas (Spanish/Portugese)