Hello!
I'm a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics and a Jackman Junior Fellow in the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. I work primarily within the intersections of semantics, typology and psycholinguistics. My dissertation committee consists of Suzi Lima, Barend Beekhuizen (co-supervisors) and Myrto Grigoroglou.
I am broadly interested in utilizing theoretical and experimental approaches to investigate parallels between the nominal and verbal domains. My current research specifically concerns how events are counted and encoded cross-linguistically, and how this is parallel to counting entities in the nominal domain.
Separately, I also conduct descriptive and theoretical work on semantic aspects of Macuxi (Carib), an indigenous language spoken in Brazil, Guyana and Venezuela. Thus far, these topics include pluractionality, space and motion.
Other languages I've worked on include: colloquial Singapore English, Malay/Indonesian, Mbyá Guaraní and Gilaki (Northwestern Iranian). I am also broadly interested in language documentation, ethical fieldwork practices, and the description of understudied languages.
Recent and upcoming:
Upcoming: I will be presenting my work on space and motion in Macuxi at:
the 2023 Canadian Linguistic Association Conference at York University, Toronto, in May
AMAZONICAS IX (International Colloquium on the Structure of Amazonian Languages) at Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia, in June
56th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea at National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece in August/September
April 2023: I presented a talk 'A taxonomy of spatial relations in Macuxi' (joint work with Francisco França Miguel and Isabella Coutinho Costa) at the Workshop on American Indigenous Languages (WAIL), hosted at UC Santa Barbara!
January 2023: I've formed my dissertation committee and am officially a PhD candidate!
December 2022:
I've successfully defended my second Generals Paper: po, ka and everything in-between: a study of spatial expressions in Macuxi!
I presented a talk, 'Toward a mapping of spatial relations in Macuxi' at the 4th Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal Indigenous Languages of Latin America (TOMILLA) Workshop (in collaboration with Francisco França Miguel) at the University of Toronto.