About me
Welcome! I am a linguist specializing in syntax and morphology. I am currently a tenure-track assistant professor at GNU. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher at UPenn where I worked with Marlyse Baptista. I received my PhD from NYU where I worked with Alec Marantz. You can find my CV here.
My projects focus on how nominal arguments are represented and licensed in syntax. In my dissertation, I investigate how case markers interact with honorific features in syntactically meaningful ways. Here, I pursue the idea that first Merge (complement-head relation) is unique and different from non-first Merge (specifier-head relation). In my other projects, I examine the syntactic size of entity nominalizations (e.g., a singer) by drawing evidence from understudied and underrepresented Bantu and Kwa family languages. My findings so far suggest that entity nominalizations come in various verbal sizes and they can be as big as TPs/NegPs and as small as a verbal complex head.
My research also focuses on evaluating LLMs on tasks related to linguistic dependencies, including, but not limited to, agreement, anaphor binding, control, negation, and politeness. I am also interested in how LMs handle low-resource and typologically diverse languages.
Research interests
- Nominal structure & nominalizations
- Argument structure
- Case & discourse markers
- (L)LM performance