I'm Greg (he/him), a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics and a Jackman Junior Fellow in the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. My dissertation supervisor is Daphna Heller.
I work primarily within the intersections of semantics, typology and psycholinguistics. I'm interested in cross-linguistic patterns involving: (a) countability in the nominal and verbal domains, (b) nominal classification, and (c) referentiality; and I'm particularly invested in using experimental methods to probe questions about these phenomena.
I am also broadly interested in language documentation, ethical fieldwork practices, and the description of understudied languages. Since 2019, I have been conducting 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 an ongoing research assistant for the Language Profiles Project (PI: Avery Ozburn), as well as for the Inuttitut Verb Class Project (PI: Susana Bejar). In my department, I currently serve as co-Editor of the Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics and co-coordinator of the Language Description, Documentation and Revitalization (LDDR) group.
Updates:
Upcoming:
April 2024: We're hosting the 27th Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas (WSCLA) at the University of Toronto from April 26-28, 2024!
May 2024: My co-authors and I from the Language Profiles Project will be presenting two talks 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 and Avery Ozburn)
March 2024: I was invited by the Society of Undergraduate Linguistics Students (SLUGS) and the Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence Students Association (CASA) to give an academic seminar — Laboratory tasks as a window into linguistic typology: artificial language learning and silent gesture.
December 2023: The latest volume of Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics is now live! Volume 46 is a peer-reviewed collection of 11 proceedings papers on Kirundi and Tshiluba, presented at the First Toronto-Montreal Bantu Colloquium (Ba-TOM) and co-edited by Jessica Coon, Suzi Lima, Claudia Raihert and myself.
September 2023: My co-authored paper on pluractionality in Macuxi has finally been published in Languages, within a special volume on South American languages!
August 2023: I presented my work on space in Macuxi (joint work with Francisco França Miguel and Isabella Coutinho Costa) at the 56th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea at National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece!
June 2023: I presented a talk 'Traversing through space in Macuxi' at the 2023 Canadian Linguistic Association Conference at York University, Toronto, and then travelled to Bogotá, Colombia to give a talk 'Mapping topological relations in Macuxi' at AMAZONICAS IX (International Colloquium on the Structure of Amazonian Languages), organised by Universidad de los Andes!