Hello!
I am a linguist broadly interested in the structure of sentences (syntax) and how these structures map to meaning (semantics). I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Linguistics at McGill University. In a previous life, I was an active coder in the Mozilla (Firefox) and WordPress open-source communities.
Areas of interest
- syntax and semantics of focus and movement
- the syntax of case, agreement, and movement
- internet corpora and experiments
In previous work I have worked on: Mandarin Chinese, English, Japanese, Kaqchikel (Mayan; Guatemala), Squliq Atayal (Austronesian; Taiwan).
See the Research page for descriptions of projects and downloadable papers.
Teaching
- Fall 2014: Research seminar “Questions, focus, and friends” with Hadas Kotek
Recent
- My dissertation: Movement Out of Focus
- I presented “On the position of focus adverbs” at Theoretical East Asian Linguistics (TEAL 9) at the University of Nantes and at NELS 45 at MIT.
- “What makes a voice system? On the relationship between voice marking and case” with Theodore Levin and Coppe van Urk will appear in the Proceedings of AFLA 21.
- “Anti-locality and optimality in Kaqchikel Agent Focus” has been accepted for publication (pending minor revisions) in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory!
Upcoming
- January 2015: I will be at the LSA, presenting a poster “On the position of focus adverbs” and also a joint poster with Theodore Levin and Coppe van Urk, “Voice morphology as extraction marking.” I will also present “Restructuring and Agent Focus in Kaqchikel” at the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA), colocated with the LSA.
- March 2015: I will present “Focus economy and the closeness condition on focus adverbs” at the DGfS workshop “What drives syntactic computation? Alternatives to formal features”.