Research

Syntactic theory

I seek to answer questions concerning the underlying mechanisms that cause language to appear to us as it does. I am interested in minimalist syntactic theories that model complex phenomena that humans naturally acquire from a young age with astonishingly little input.

My primary modes of investigation for these phenomena are Internet corpora, and the elicitation of grammaticality judgments and linguistic data. I am particularly interested in data from colloquial or nonstandard varieties of language, as these offer crucial information on the human language faculty and are often overlooked (unintentionally or otherwise) in syntactic research. A few specific syntactic phenomena that I am interested in (in no particular order) are:

• The distribution of null elements in the syntax. I am particularly interested in the difference between languages like English and Spanish with regard to their allowance of null subjects.

• Syntactic constituents that seemingly make no contribution to semantic interpretation (e.g. expletives).

• Feature mismatches in agreement, such as those that can occur in English verbal agreement and Spanish adjectival agreement.

• English multiple modal constructions.

• The syntax of inversion constructions (e.g. quotative, locative, predicate) and voice.

• The distribution and projection of phi-features (person, number, gender).

Language education

I am interested in how insights from formal linguistic theory can improve access to and experiences with language education, particularly for populations who speak nonstandard and minoritized language varieties, as well as populations who speak a language with little to no metalinguistic awareness, such as heritage speakers. I am to show to that enforcing prescriptive norms around language use does not actually conform to how language is represented in the brain, and also serves as an obstacle for language education.

Emoji linguistics

I am interested in the distribution of emoijs in natural language, particulary emojis that appear in sentences as morphosyntactic constituents (e.g. "I ❤️ NY"). I am interested in how these pictorial symbols are combined with preexisting linguistic structures and how they are interpreted as depictive or semi-depictive elements.

My research definitively shows that language users have grammaticality judgments and intuitions about the placement of emojis in written (and even spoken!) utterances in multiple languages including English and Spanish (for instance, verbal agreement/tense affixes are generally possible with emojis in English, but not in Spanish), and that these judgments conform to the rules of the relevant language. I am interested in the questions this raises for theories of language processing and acquisition.

Generative AI systems such as ChatGPT struggle with the intepretation of sentences containing emojis as lexical items. I am interested in researching how generative AI systems interpret and predict emoji use in human language users, and where these systems fall short.

Syntactic variation

I am interested in the ways syntactic phenomena vary across dialects and language, and how these variations can be accounted for. I am mostly interested in colloquial forms of language, minoritized dialects, and phenomena specific to computer-mediated communication (CMC). Almost all of my research is informed  by English and Spanish, and I have also worked significantly on Dutch, Setswana, and Tshila.

I investigate syntactic variation via fieldwork and Internet corpora.

Here is a photo of Chris Collins, two of our Tshila consultants, and myself doing fieldwork in the village of Kaudwane in the Kalahari desert in Botswana. I have plans to continue my research on Tshila, and hopefully am able to take others there with me who are interested in the language.

LGBТ language

I am interested in the language used by LGBТ individuals and their communities, how these varieties differ from the language of the dominant culture, and what this community's language can tell us about the architecture of human language and culture. I research language use specific to the LGBТ community online, as well as the syntax of gender in LGBТ language.