About

Jonathan David Bobaljik is a professor affiliated with the Harvard University Department of Linguistics. His research focuses on linguistic morphology, with particular attention to universals and variation as evidenced in Kamchatkan languages, such as Itelmen. He has contributed to the study of agreement phenomena, clusivity, contextual allomorphy, and the prosodic realization of objects in verb-final languages. Bobaljik's work includes phonological analysis and documentation of Itelmen, including traditional songs and language revitalization efforts. He has been involved in scholarly editions of previously unpublished Itelmen texts and has contributed to the development of Itelmen language resources, such as dictionaries and audio-video materials. His research integrates fieldwork, theoretical linguistics, and language documentation, with a strong emphasis on the Itelmen language and its morphosyntactic and phonological properties.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• Artificial Intelligence
• Natural Language Processing
• Psychology
• Physics
• Statistics
• Biology
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• On the prosodic realization of pre- and post-verbal objects in Itelmen

  2026-05-14

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Linguistic characteristics of bimodal bilingual code-blending: Evidence from acceptability judgments

  Bilingualism Language and Cognition · 2025-05-13

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Code-blending is the simultaneous expression of utterances using both a sign language and a spoken language. We expect that like code-switching, code-blending is linguistically constrained and thus we investigate two hypothesized constraints using an acceptability judgment task. Participants rated the acceptability of code-blended utterances designed to be consistent or inconsistent with these hypothesized constraints. We find strong support for the proposed constraint that each modality of code-blended utterances contributes content to a single proposition. We also find support for the proposed constraint that – at least for American Sign Language (ASL) and English – code-blended utterances make use of a single derivation which is realized using surface forms in the two languages, rather than two simultaneous derivations, one for each language. While this study was limited to ASL/English code-blending and further investigation is needed, we hope that this novel study will encourage future research comparing linguistic constraints on code-blending and code-switching.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dominant domains in vowel harmony: A structural approach to a linear asymmetry

  Natural Language & Linguistic Theory · 2025-05-29 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract In this paper, we make two main claims: (i) we claim that a proposed prefix-suffix asymmetry (the absence of dominant prefixes in bi-directional dominant-recessive vowel harmony systems) is in fact a special case of a broader generalization that should be stated in hierarchical terms (domains), not linear order (prefixes), (ii) we contend moreover that the relevant domains are best defined in morphosyntactic terms (the juncture between Aspect and Tense, cf. “phases”) rather than in morphophonological terms (the “stem” of Stratal OT and other work). We offer an account under a slight modification of an existing constraint-based cyclic approach to Vowel Harmony (Kiparsky 2024) and compare this to a rule-based (feature-filling) implementation of the Cyclic Spell-Out of morphosyntactic structure.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Text setting in an Itelmen khodila: A phonological analysis

  Language · 2023-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We examine a traditional Itelmen song type (itl; Chukotko-Kamchatkan) from the perspective of text setting: the phonological correspondence between spoken language and sung text. We suggest that the algorithm that relates spoken text to song in Itelmen is unlike the majority of examples considered in the literature on English and other languages, in that linguistic stress and metrical prominence play no discernible role, nor does syllable weight. Instead, the driving force appears to be matching word edges to (half-)measure boundaries, resulting in predictable anaptyxis (vowel epenthesis) and lengthening. The process is paraphonological in that it is related to, but distinct from, the regular phonology of the language, both in the quality of the epenthetic elements and in their placement. While the algorithm makes use of (and thus may inform us about) Itelmen phonotactics, the relationship is not readily characterizable as being phonotactically motivated but is instead controlled by a pattern of mapping linguistic syllables to musical beats.

  PublisherDOI

• Text setting in an Itelmen khodila: A phonological analysis: Supplementary material

  Language · 2023-06-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Supplemental Material Online

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Kŋaloz'a'n Ujeret'i'n Ŋetełkila'n—Keepers of the Native Hearth

  2023-03-20

  book-chapterOpen access

  This chapter describes a long-term collaboration among linguists, Indigenous scholars, anthropologists, cultural consultants, and community members concerned with the fate of the Itelmen language in Kamchatka, Russia. Itelmen has been the object of systematic inquiry by scholars for nearly 300 years. For over 100 years, visitors and linguistic researchers have predicted it would soon no longer be spoken. Yet, though there are few speakers today, the language is still spoken, and conservation and revitalization efforts have intensified since the late 1980s. We briefly review the history of language documentation, especially recent decades of collaborative efforts of the authors with Itelmen scholars and enthusiasts. In addition to field research by Ono and Bobaljik, a gathering of speakers and cultural knowledge bearers from across Kamchatka was organized in 2012. These efforts, combined with the recent language revitalization work of Degai and earlier work by colleagues Erich Kasten, Michael Dürr, and Klavdiia Khaloimova have created a rich body of materials for revitalization of the language, ranging from traditional classroom teaching materials to karaoke CDs, computer resources, and most recently a comprehensive Itelmen dictionary. The chapter describes our long-term collaborations, fieldwork, gatherings, speakers’ efforts and dedication, and resulting documentation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The lexical core of a complex functional affix: Russian baby diminutive -onok

  Natural Language & Linguistic Theory · 2022 · 14 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Linguistics
  • Psychology
  • Philosophy
  PublisherDOI

• Gender asymmetries in ellipsis: An experimental comparison of markedness and frequency accounts in English

  Journal of Linguistics · 2021 · 11 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Linguistics

  Bobaljik & Zocca (2011) argue that ellipsis reveals the existence of (at least) two classes of gender-paired nouns: in the actor / actress class, the grammatically feminine form is specified for conceptual gender, while the unaffixed form is unspecified, exemplifying the classic markedness asymmetry (Jakobson 1932); in the prince / princess class, both forms are specified for conceptual gender. Here we test two theories of this asymmetry: one that encodes markedness in the linguistic representation (e.g. Merchant 2014, Sudo & Spathas 2016, and Saab 2019), and one that traces the asymmetry to differences in the relative frequency of the forms in each pair (Haspelmath 2006). The frequency approach predicts that the size of the asymmetries (as quantified by acceptability judgments) will correlate with the size of the relative frequency ratio for each pair. We test this prediction in two experiments: the first is a curated set of 16 pairs in English, and the second is a test of 58 pairs that nearly exhausts such pairs in English. We use frequencies from COCA (Davies 2008) to test the prediction of the frequency approach. Our results suggest that the relative frequency hypothesis is not an empirically adequate competitor for the explanation of gender asymmetries.

  PublisherDOI

• The size of things I

  2021

  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Computer Science

  This book focuses on the role size plays in grammar. Under the umbrella term size fall the size of syntactic projections, the size of feature content, and the size of reference sets. The contributions in this first volume discuss size and structure building. The most productive research program in syntax where size plays a central role revolves around clausal complements. Part 1 of Volume I contributes to this program with papers that argue for particular structures of clausal complements, as well as papers that employ sizes of clausal complements to account for other phenomena. The papers in Part 2 of this volume explore the interaction between size and structure building beyond clausal complements, including phenomena in CP, vP, and NP domains. The contributions cover a variety of languages, many of which are understudied. The book is complemented by Volume II which discusses size effects in movement, agreement, and interpretation.

  Publisher

• Forthcoming: Syntactic architecture and its consequences III

  2020

  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Natural Language Processing

  This volume collects novel contributions to comparative generative linguistics that “rethink” existing approaches to an extensive range of phenomena, domains, and architectural questions in linguistic theory. At the heart of the contributions is the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy which has long animated generative linguistics and which continues to grow thanks to the increasing amount and diversity of data available to us. The chapters develop novel insights into a number of core syntactic phenomena, such as the structure of and variation in diathesis, alignment types, case and agreement splits, and the syntax of null elements. Many of these contributions show the influence of research by Ian Roberts and collaborators and they provide varied perspectives on current research in synchronic and diachronic comparative syntax. This book is complemented by volume I available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/275 and volume II available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/276.

  Publisher

Recent grants

• An Integrated Morphosemantics of Agreement

  NSF · $156k · 2006–2010

Frequent coauthors

• Robert D. Borsley

  Bangor University

  155 shared

• Caroline Heycock

  152 shared

• Colin Phillips

  152 shared

• Nigel Fabb

  University of Strathclyde

  152 shared

• Geneva Laurence

  University of Strathclyde

  151 shared

• Eric Haeberli

  151 shared

• Andrew Simpson

  Durham University

  151 shared

• Janet Dean

  Sussex County Community College

  151 shared