My specialization in linguistics is theoretical syntax and its interfaces with morphology, semantics, and pragmatics. I also have secondary interests in language acquisition and have developed several experiments on the acquisition of the syntax and semantics of Standard American English and African American English.

 

The ultimate goal of my research is to help uncover principles that govern the mapping between linguistic form and meaning, i.e., how we humans come to compute the (intended) meaning of an utterance on the basis of its form.

 

In the past ten years, I have been exploring Aspect, Existential Sentences, Free Choice, Implicature, Internally-Headed Relative Clauses (e.g., my dissertation),  E-type Anaphora, Adjectives, Complementation vs. Modification,   Binding, Case, and Possessor Raising. Currently, I have growing interests in grammaticalization and aim to help model the fascinating phenomenon within a formal framework.