Hello!
I am an Associate Professor (Presidential Young Professor) in Linguistics at the National University of Singapore and currently a Core Fellow at the University of Helsinki’s Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. I received my Ph.D. from MIT Linguistics in 2014. My lab investigates the structure of sentences (syntax) and how these structures map to meaning (semantics). Much of our work is based on the study of historically understudied languages, especially of Southeast Asia. I serve as Associate Editor at Glossa and Journal of Semantics and on the Editorial Boards of Natural Language & Linguistic Theory and Journal of East Asian Linguistics.
Areas of interest
- Movement: (anti-)locality, (anti-)pied-piping, extraction restrictions, interactions with case and agreement, the interpretation of movement chains
- Focus and alternatives: focus particles, questions, wh-quantification, disjunction, discourse organization (QUDs), implicature calculation
My work has investigated:
- Austronesian: Toba Batak, Rejang (Sumatra), Bikol, Kapampangan, Pangasinan, Pangasinan (Philippines), Desa, Kayan, Desa (Borneo), and Squliq Atayal (Taiwan);
- Tibeto-Burman: Tibetan and Burmese;
- Mayan: Kaqchikel and Chuj (Guatemala);
- Mandarin Chinese; English; Japanese; Vietnamese; Singlish; Turkish…
See the Projects page for descriptions of projects and downloadable papers.
Upcoming
- August 2024: Workshop on Mismatches in Information Structure at the SLE annual meeting in Helsinki, co-organized with Silvio Cruschina!
- September 2024: Sinn und Bedeutung 29, presenting “On the unity of wh and focus alternatives”
Recent
- Talk, June 2024: “On the syntax of the analytic passive in Kenyah” with Alex Smith, at the First International Symposium on Bornean Linguistics (ISBL1)
- Paper published, May 2024: “Voice and pronominal forms in Kayan (Uma Nyaving)” with Alex Smith and Carly Sommerlot in Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society
- Paper published, April 2024: “Ā-probing for the closest DP” with Kenyon Branan in Linguistic Inquiry
- Revised paper, April 2024: “Interrogative and standard disjunction in Mandarin Chinese”; comments welcome!
- Talk, January 2024: Presented “The Malayic verbal phase and Cyclic Linearization” with Carly Sommerlot at NELS 54 and the LSA annual meeting
- Talk, January 2024: Presented “Determining the scope of Tagalog clitic adverbs” with Henrison Hsieh at the LSA annual meeting
- Video, January 2024: Short video on “Kaqchikel Agent Focus and multiple extraction” as part of the University of Göttingen’s online Glottothèque: Mayan languages initiative
- Talk, November 2023: “Cross-linguistic variation in ordinary vs interrogative disjunctions” at the BUCLA8 Workshop on Logical Operators
- Talks, October 2023: At AFLA 30, presented:
- New paper, September 2023: “Voice and extraction in Malayic” with Carly Sommerlot; comments welcome!
- Paper published, September 2023: “Anti-pied-piping” with Kenyon Branan is in Language issue 99.3!
- Paper accepted, August 2023: “Ingredients of excess: A study of Vietnamese quá” with Anne Nguyen was accepted with Asian Languages and Linguistics
- Paper published, August 2023: “Bikol clefts and topics and the Austronesian extraction restriction” with Cheryl Lim, in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory
- Paper published, July 2023: “A syntactic universal in a contact language: The story of Singlish already” in Discourse particles in Asian languages volume 2: Southeast Asia