Research
Syntactic Theory
I seek to answer questions concerning the underlying mechanisms that cause language to appear to us the way it does, specifically exploring the phenomena of null or deficient elements in the syntax, as well as agreement phenomena. My primary modes of investigation for these phenomena are language corpora, Internet data, and the elicitation of grammaticality judgments and linguistic data. I am particularly interested in data from colloquial or nonstandard varieties of language, as these offer crucial information on the human language faculty and are often overlooked (unintentionally or otherwise) in syntactic research. A few specific syntactic phenomena that I am interested in are:
The distribution of null DPs (e.g. pro and PRO).
Syntactic constituents that make no contribution to semantic interpretation (e.g. expletives).
Feature mismatches in Agree operations.
The syntax of null prepositions.
English multiple modal constructions.
The syntax of inversion constructions (e.g. quotative, locative, predicate).
Neopronouns as a syntactic phenomenon.
The distribution and projection of phi-features.
Syntactic Variation
I am interested in the ways syntactic phenomena vary across dialects and language, and how these variations can be accounted for in the Minimalist program. I am mostly interested in colloquial forms of language, minoritized dialects, and phenomena specific to computer-mediated communication (CMC). Some languages I have worked on include English, Spanish, Dutch, Setswana, and Tshila.
I am interested in questions of multilingualism and multimodality, such as how different grammars and different modalities are represented in multilingual and multimodal language users. I adopt a framing of multilingualism and multimodality in a way that supports equality and justice for users of minoritized varieties of language across any modality.
This is a photo of Chris Collins, two of our Tshila consultants, and myself doing fieldwork in the village of Kaudwane in the Kalahari desert in Botswana.
Superlinguistics
Superlinguistics is concerned with the study of objects that are not usually considered part of language using formal linguistic methodology. Within this domain I am interested in the incorporation of iconic visual elements into symbolic linguistic systems: namely emojis. I research the integration of emojis into linguistic utterance in CMC, not just as the orthographic counterparts of gestures and facial expressions, but as morphosyntactic constituents (pro-text emojis). I also study the ways in which the iconicity of visual pro-language forms factors into their interpretation.
Queer Language
I am interested in the languague used by LGBTQ+ individuals and their communities, and how these varieties differ from the language of the dominant culture. I research language use specific to the LGBTQ+ community online, as well as the syntax of gender in queer language.