I'm Greg (he/him), a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. My dissertation supervisor is Daphna Heller, and my committee members are Michela Ippolito and Craig Chambers. 

I work primarily within the intersections of semantics and psycholinguistics, particularly on the topic of reference. I'm interested in how reference works in languages without overt definite determiners. My dissertation research explores how definite and demonstrative descriptions are used across various contexts in Mandarin Chinese, and the mechanisms that potentially drive these distributions. Specifically, my work explores topics including uniqueness, familiarity and bridging, making use of methods from cognitive science (i.e., production (constrained and naturalistic) and comprehension studies).

I am also deeply interested in language documentation, ethical fieldwork practices, and the description and analysis of understudied languages. As part of the Inuttitut Language Group (PI: Susana Bejar), I am currently investigating topics (including reference!) in Labrador Inuttitut. Earlier in my graduate studies, I conducted descriptive and theoretical work on semantic aspects of Macuxi (Cariban), an indigenous language spoken in Brazil, Guyana and Venezuela, on topics including pluractionality, space and motion. 

My work has been supported by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2025-2026), the Mark Gayn Graduate Scholarship (2025-2026), a Doctoral Fellowship (2021-25) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and a Jackman Junior Fellowship from the Jackman Humanities Institute (2020–24).