Within linguistics, my core passion is the documentation of understudied, minoritized, and endangered languages, and my formal research interests have included verbal morphosyntax, A'-constructions, and ellipsis.

Led into linguistics from an early age by my creative practice of conlanging, I received my Master's in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2021. My Master's qualifying paper was the result of 3-4 years of ex-situ fieldwork on a Central Philippine language named Aklanon with R. David and Nellie Zorc. In my qualifying paper, I documented and analyzed the so-called 'event existential construction' in Aklanon. I proposed that the existential verb may embeds a headless relative clause with both raising and control to introduce existentially quantified arguments into discourse. This paper has been published after undergoing peer review in glossa: a journal of general linguistics, and more can be found there.

Prior to pursuing my graduate studies, I graduated in 2015 from New York University with an undergraduate degree in Linguistics and a double-minor in Mandarin Chinese and Global Visual Arts. My thesis, Filling in the Gaps — Revisting the Syntax of English Gapping Constructions, proposes a particular analysis of a well-known (fascinating nonetheless) construction called gapping. An example of gapping is the bolded portion of the sentence below:

  • Janet likes to paint horses, and Emily, landscapes.

In my thesis, I developed arguments to show that gaps have unspoken structure, and come from a source like:

  • Janet likes to paint horses, and Emily (likes to paint) landscapes.

Throughout my time at NYU, I grew more and more conscious that globalization, industrialization, and (economic) colonialism all pose a severe threat to diversity of biology, thought, culture, and language. The profound nature of language endangerment reoriented my priorities such that I became intent on addressing issues that were not purely theoretical and started volunteering at the Endangered Language Alliance. I have collaborated on language documentation projects in New York City/Sikles, NepalBotswana, and New York City/Rovinj, Croatia.