Research interests:

Theory and application: 

• historical phonology, especially computational approaches and the dynamics driving sound change 
  • I run the DiaSim lab, which provides research experiences for undergraduates, using automated diachronic simulation to test hypothesized relative chronologies of sound change and the interference of morphological analogy
  • Computerized Forward Reconstruction (CFR): on this, see my first two publications in the section below, coauthored with David Mortensen
    • my system, DiaSim, is public access and I am working on making it more public friendly. If you are good at graphics and making GUIs, I am interested in your help!
  • systematic aspects of historical phonology: functional load, transphonologization, etc.
  • dabbling in other computational approaches to diachrony: loanword and refection detection, neural approaches, probabilistic reconstruction etc. 
• phonological theory: 
  • phonemicity; substance-free phonology; phonological units understood through informativity and entropy
  • phonology-morphology interface in synchrony and diachrony; morphomics; paradigmatic learning approaches applied to phonology

• histories of language interaction: language contact (especially with a sprachbund approach), historical language demography, language extinction

   

Languages I work with:  

• Romance: especially French and other oil varieties; Romanian; in my lab, overseeing student work on Romanian, Spanish and Catalan
• Balkan: Albanian most of all; Messapic, Romanian, Turkish, Greek (modern, ancient Attic and Doric), Balkan Slavic varieties, a bit of Phrygian
• Other (in collaborative works, or side passions): 
  • Indo-European: Celtic (all branches but mainly Gaulish), Hittite, Sanskrit, Iranian (Sogdian, Avestan), hope to learn more about Armenian
  • Beyond (relative chronology work): Semitic diachrony broadly, Austronesian with a focus on Punan
     

Peer-reviewed papers: 

• Herce, B. & Marr, C. 2026. “The effects of sound change vs analogy on paradigm complexity”. Language. In press.
• Naik, A., Agrawal, D., Sng, H., Marr, C., Zhang, K., Rosé, C. et al. 2025. Programming by Examples Meets Historical Linguistics: A Large Language Model Based Approach to Sound Law Induction. In: arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.16524 
• Marr, C. (2024 "A missed regular sound change between Latin and French: velar onset voicing”. Indogermanische Forschungen 129 (1): 7-43. 
• Naik, A., Zhang, K., Robinson, N., Mysore, A., Marr, C., Sng, H., Byrnes, R., Cai, A., Chang, K. and Mortensen, D. (2024). "Can Large Language Models Code Like a Linguist?: A Case Study in Low Resource Sound Law Induction". arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.12725.
• Marr, C. (2023) “The Angevin--Albanian element in the Albanian lexicon”. Zeitschrift für Balkanologie 59: 15-40. 
• Marr, C. and Mortensen, D. (2022) “Large-Scale Computerized Forward Reconstruction Yields New Perspectives in French Diachronic Phonology”. Diachronica 40 (2): 238-285. Print release in 2023.

• Marr, C. and Mortensen, D. (2020) “Computerized Forward Reconstruction for Analysis in Diachronic Phonology, and Latin to French Reflex Prediction”. Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA).

   

Teaching: 

• Introduction to Linguistics

• Undergraduate-level historical linguistics (LING 3901 "Language Evolution and Language Change")

   

Trivia:

• I will accept pronunciations of my name with either a [ʔ], a [ɾ], or an unreleased T. You are free to innovate as well. Some people pronounce the /l/ as a lateral fricative, which is rather curious. 
• With Lindon Dedvukaj, I have designed a "reconlang" version of Ancient Macedonian upon request, for use in a series.
• from ages 16 to 22, I ended up as Frodo by popular demand for Halloween seven years in a row
• like at least two other people in this department (and counting) I have been an oboist 
• I bear no relation that I know of to some people in history who (perhaps unfortunately) have a last name spelled like mine, and (fortunately) that includes the Soviet linguist N.R. Marr. I (unfortunately) also do not have any relation that I know of to the neuroscientist/cognitive scientist David Marr.