About
I am an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. I got my BA from the University of Michigan and I recently completed my PhD at Rutgers University; my dissertation is called Degree Modification in Natural Language.
Research Interests
I am a theoretical linguist, which means that instead of studying a particular language, I study particular phenomena as they occur across languages. This way of approaching the discipline is based on the assumption that languages are fundamentally similar, which is itself based on Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar.
I am a semanticist, which means that I study the meanings of words and how they combine to form the meanings of sentences. Even more specifically, I am interested in degree semantics (the meaning of phrases that refer to or modify degrees of things, like very tall or many pizzas) and the meaning of 'wh-words' like who, what, how, etc., and the constructions they occur in (like interrogatives, exclamatives and relative clauses).