About me

I am a fourth year student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park, where I am advised by Norbert Hornstein and Howard Lasnik.

My research interests are in syntax, syntax-semantics, and parsing.

At the moment, I am primarily interested in long-distance dependencies, which, in my eyes, is one of the magics of linguistic cognition, and perhaps cognition in general. How can certain dependencies span over multiple clause boundaries while most can’t, and when and why do they break down? I am looking at wh-quantifier float in German, its evidence for successive cyclic movement through vP, and other properties of wh-movement that this phenomenon highlights. My favorite at the moment is that wh-movement can strand the quantifier alles, but A-movement cannot. (And for anyone interested in Scrambling: Scrambling behaves like A-movement in this regard!)

In the parsing domain, I am collaborating with Zoe Ovans and Ellen Lau looking into the question of whether there are any grounds to posit continuous representations, the test case being how agreement attraction is judged on a continuous scale.

I am also getting drawn to the prized question of how language is learned. While I am still just engaging in the tradition of making armchair contributions (What is the range of hypotheses at the Learner’s disposal?), I am preparing a project on speaker variation in the grammar of the Exceptional Case Marking construction in English to see what it might tell us about the learning and learnability of Raising vs. exceptional case-marking. This is inspirational to me in this respect right now.