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 of the 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, Tagalog (Philippines), Desa, Kayan, Lebo’ Vo’ (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
- September 2024: Sinn und Bedeutung 29, presenting “On the unity of wh and focus alternatives”
Recent
- Paper accepted, September 2024: “Interrogative and standard disjunction in Mandarin Chinese” accepted with revisions with Journal of Semantics
- August 2024:
- Silvio Cruschina and I organized a workshop on Mismatches in Information Structure at the SLE annual meeting in Helsinki
- Presenting “Emergence of passive voice in Central Borneo” with Alex Smith at the SLE workshop on passivization
- Revised paper, August 2024: “Voice and extraction in Malayic” with Carly Sommerlot
- Paper published, July 2024: “Ingredients of excess: A study of Vietnamese quá” with Anne Nguyen in Asian Languages and Linguistics
- 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
Less recent but still pretty good
- “Anti-pied-piping” with Kenyon Branan in Language, 2023
- “Bikol clefts and topics and the Austronesian extraction restriction” with Cheryl Lim, in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 2023