Toni came to UVM in 2014. She works on the phonology-morphology interface in Zulu, along with dialectal differences between the Zulu spoken in urban townships around Durban, vs. the variety spoken in rural areas around the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa.

 

She received her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013, with a dissertation focusing on a Zulu verb doubling process known as reduplication, and using new data to support a derivational approach to how morphology and phonology interact in the language. After completing her Ph.D. she had a two-year postdoctoral position in Durban, South Africa, where she was well situated to collect sociolinguistic data from a wide range of Zulu speakers. Most significantly, this included a fieldwork trip throughout KwaZulu-Natal in which she and two native Zulu speakers conducted sociolinguistic interviews to build up a corpus with a cross-section of gender, education, and age.

 

Toni is currently working on projects on the urban-rural split in reduplication, changes in tonal domains in Durban Zulu, and the realization of the ‘ng’ variable.