I am a fifth year PhD student in the Linguistics department at University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. Previously, I was a graduate student at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad (erstwhile Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, CIEFL). My primary research area is the syntax-semantics interface. I work on a variety of topics including, expression of degree modification, predication, and comparison, adjectival semantics and syntax, argument ellipsis, plurals and the mass/count distinction, notions of finiteness and case, and the phenomenon of closest conjunct agreement. My collaborators are Roumyana Pancheva, Andrew Simpson, Sarah Ouwayda, and Arunima Chowdhury. In addition to my theoretical work, I am interested in cognitive and musical processing, in particular, pursuing the relation between music and language through a series of psycholinguistic priming experiments. On this project, I collaborate with Elsi Kaiser. I am also interested in understanding where biases in parsing comes from, particularly relative clause attachment biases. On this project, I collaborate with Elsi Kaiser and Felix Hao Wang. I am also a member of the Society for Music Perception andCognition (SMPC). Lastly, I am interested in language documentation, language conservation and revitalization. Along with Roumyana Pancheva and photographer Hari Menon, I am documenting the endangered, moribund language Judeo-Malayalam spoken by about forty people in Cochin, India. In summer 2014, along with Hari, I will be preparing a coffee table book, visually documenting the last remaining Jews of Cochin. Please check our website for more information. This project has been featured in the media recently: DNA India and the Deccan Chronicle. To learn more about all this, please check the links above. You can also find my fictional alter ego here and my culinary alter ego here and here. I recently started writing a blog with a friend, on getting around LA without a car. You can read about our adventures here.
I am a fifth year PhD student in the Linguistics department at University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. Previously, I was a graduate student at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad (erstwhile Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, CIEFL). My primary research area is the syntax-semantics interface. I work on a variety of topics including, expression of degree modification, predication, and comparison, adjectival semantics and syntax, argument ellipsis, plurals and the mass/count distinction, notions of finiteness and case, and the phenomenon of closest conjunct agreement. My collaborators are Roumyana Pancheva, Andrew Simpson, Sarah Ouwayda, and Arunima Chowdhury. In addition to my theoretical work, I am interested in cognitive and musical processing, in particular, pursuing the relation between music and language through a series of psycholinguistic priming experiments. On this project, I collaborate with Elsi Kaiser. I am also interested in understanding where biases in parsing comes from, particularly relative clause attachment biases. On this project, I collaborate with Elsi Kaiser and Felix Hao Wang. I am also a member of the Society for Music Perception andCognition (SMPC). Lastly, I am interested in language documentation, language conservation and revitalization. Along with Roumyana Pancheva and photographer Hari Menon, I am documenting the endangered, moribund language Judeo-Malayalam spoken by about forty people in Cochin, India. In summer 2014, along with Hari, I will be preparing a coffee table book, visually documenting the last remaining Jews of Cochin. Please check our website for more information. This project has been featured in the media recently: DNA India and the Deccan Chronicle. To learn more about all this, please check the links above. You can also find my fictional alter ego here and my culinary alter ego here and here. I recently started writing a blog with a friend, on getting around LA without a car. You can read about our adventures here.
