I’m a Postdoctoral Associate in Syntax in the Linguistics Department at Georgetown University. I received my PhD in Linguistics from the University of Maryland in 2025.

My research is primarily in syntax and its interfaces with form and meaning, with an empirical focus on Slavic and Mayan languages. I combine formal analysis, hypothesis-driven fieldwork, and psycholinguistic experiments to explore and understand proposed empirical generalizations and the extent to which they rely on inductive biases specific to humans. I use these findings to evaluate competing hypotheses about the nature of grammatical knowledge, with the goal of developing principled accounts of systematic cross-linguistic regularities.

My dissertation engages with the following questions: What are the basic building blocks of syntax and how do they map onto lexical categories, as traditionally construed? Does structure-building look the same above and below the ‘word’ level? Do locality effects in the syntax and at the interfaces have a common origin?

Topics I’ve worked on include mixed categories (participles and nominalizations), locality in syntax and at the interfaces, ellipsis, tense/aspect, allomorphy, raising, and issues in the extended projection of nominals (case, gender, the NP/DP debate).