Current students
I am currently supervising the following PhD students. I feel so privileged to have such a diverse group of students with so many different topics, and so many of them working on their own (understudied) languages.
Anne Bertrand
is working on the grammar of scalar expression in Ktunaxa, a language isolate spoken in British Columbia (Canada). She is combining formal linguistic research and language revitalization by ensuring that her research activities are accessible and relevant to the community.
Danish Farman
is working on the marking of (dis)agreement with response markers in his native language Hindi/Urdu. This is a project at the syntax/pragmatics interface. One of the interesting things about these response markers is that they are sensitive to formality.
Matthew Galbraith:
is working on the role of interactional language in Large Language Models. He is exploring whether the use of units of interactional language (such as huh) might enhance the user-friendliness of voice assistants.
Nicolás Rivera Bobadilla
is working on interjections in Chilean Spanish. He uses conversation analytic tools and the conversation-board elicitation technique to explore this question. These interjections express emotive and epistemic content and hence can serve as a window into the relation between language, emotions, and epistemicity.
Shahani Singh Shrestha
is working on Egophoricity in her native language Kathmandu Newar. Egophoricity is used to mark epistemic access to the propositional content. It also interacts with formality in interesting ways that is bound to shed light on the relation between formality and common ground.
Tamar Gogia
is working on pronouns and demonstratives in her native languages Georgian and Megrelian. These languages have rich paradigms, with some typologically unusual properties that are bound to shed light on our understanding of nominal structure.
Xiaomeng Sun
is working on the use of sentence-final particles in Mandarin self-talk.
Xinhe (Irene) Tian
was a visiting doctoral student from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
She is working on Mandarin 2nd person pronouns when they are NOT used to refer to the addressee.