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.
Via experimental approaches like artificial language learning, my work investigates the cross-linguistic distribution of the countability and multiplicity of events and sub-events, and whether these typological patterns can be attributed to cognitive biases on the individual level.
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 a 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:
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!