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. I'm interested in cross-linguistic patterns involving: referring expressions, definiteness, and plurality. My dissertation explores these topics in Mandarin, a known determiner-less language, via elicited production studies.
Beyond Mandarin, I am deeply interested in language documentation, ethical fieldwork practices, and the description and analysis of understudied languages. I'm currently working on Labrador Inuttitut, as part of the Inuttitut Verb Class Project (PI: Susana Bejar). 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.
I'm also an ongoing research assistant for the Language Profiles Project (PI: Avery Ozburn), an initiative to include and contextualize under-represented languages within the teaching of linguistics in university classrooms. In my department, I also serve as co-Editor of the Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics.
My work is supported by a Doctoral Fellowship (2021-25) from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and a Jackman Junior Fellowship from the Jackman Humanities Institute (2020–24).
Updates:
July 2024:
Late July: I attended the Linguistic Summer Institute of Taiwan, held at the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, Taiwan! It was my pleasure meeting and learning from folks working on Mandarin syntax/semantics.
15 July: I successfully defended my oral proposal for my dissertation: Topics in Mandarin referring expressions!
June 2024: My co-authors (Avery Ozburn and Jeffrey Lamontagne) from the Language Profiles Project presented a talk 'The Language Profiles Project for linguistics pedagogy' at the Canadian Linguistic Association 2024 conference at Carleton University in Ottawa.
May 2024: My co-authors and I from the Language Profiles Project presented a poster and a talk at the 55th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, hosted by McGill University in Montreal from 2-4 May 2024:
Community- and context-based approaches to African linguistics: the Language Profiles Project. (with Avery Ozburn and Saba Mirabolghasemi)
Mapping African languages. (with Liam McFadden, Samuel Akinbo, Yiting Deng and Avery Ozburn)
April 2024: We organized and hosted the 27th Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas (WSCLA) at the University of Toronto from April 26-28, 2024!