Research

I work mainly at the syntax/semantics interface—meaning that I’m deeply curious about how components of meaning map onto syntactic structures. Specific areas that I’m interested in include complex predicates, argument/event structure, syntactic categories, and modality. My work draws heavily on fieldwork with diaspora speakers of Hmong, as well as on typological comparison with other (particularly East Asian) languages.

Some questions that I’m interested in:

• What principles govern the formation of complex predicates? What meanings can (and can’t) they encode? How do “lexical” serial verb constructions differ from “functional” light verbs?
• What are the semantic building blocks of the directional PP? What is its argument structure? How highly-articulated is the syntax of the prepositional extended projection?
• How do modals compose in the syntax? How pervasive is sublexical modality, and where can we see its effect on other (at-issue or not-at-issue) meanings?
• Why do languages show different types of “categorial flexibility”? What constrains zero-derivation, and why do some types of zero-derivation seem mutually exclusive?

Postdoctoral Fellowship

• Syntactic categories in White Hmong
  Supervisor: Richard Compton, Université du Québec à Montréal
  Supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec
  

Selected Publications

• Paths across worlds: The presupposition of back in intensional contexts.
  Manuscript. Resubmitted following revisions.
• Event structure and serial verbs in Hmong
  PhD thesis, McGill University. 2024. [pdf]
• Pair-list answers to questions with plural definites
  Semantics and Pragmatics. 2023. [doi]

Selected Talks

• Path in Hmong: The structure of directional PPs
  Annual Meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association.
  Invited talk. June 19, 2024.
• The verb phrase in Hmong: Serialization and event structure
  University of Minnesota Linguistics Colloquium Series.
  Invited talk. November 11, 2022.