Research interests and active projects / Linguistics
My research interests include syntactic variation, heritage language syntax, agreement systems, Italo-Romance and Indo-Aryan dialectology, honorifics, language change in contact, and language contact in migration contexts.
Many of these projects represent ongoing work, preprints, or submitted manuscripts. If you would like to read a draft or discuss potential collaboration, please feel free to reach out via email.
1/ Features & Honorifics
Featural Contact Between Chinese Dialects (with Zetao Xu and Victor Pan)Status: draft submittedThis current study investigates demonstrative usage in Mandarin-English and Cantonese-English bilingual children, showing how the degree of reinterpretation of definite elements is mitigated by the receiving language.
Addressee surfacing and honorificity (with Iarina Albu, Gabriel Carlin-Coleman, Idan Caspi, and Laia Colina Fortuny)
Status: paper submitted and accepted with minor revisions as "Deixis in motion: Addressee surfacing and the politeness path," Linguistic Variation.
The featural setup of honorific pronouns and featural architecture
Status:
1/ paper presented at the Long Distance Agreement Workshop in Barcelona, May 2026
2/ research project with Jason Rothman, Pritha Chandra and Divyanshi Shaktawat on honorifics in UK Hindi
Monotonocity (with Silvia Terenghi)
Status: draft submitted
Pronouns evolve monotonically
2/ Linguistic Variation / Comparative Syntax / Minority languages
Sarnámi Syntax (with Joeri Vinke)
Status: paper presented at WCCFL44: What we talk about when we talk about Transfer
This is a long-standing project of documentation and analysis of an Eastern Indo-Aryan language spoken in Suriname and nowadays in the Netherlands. Joeri has already written his RMA thesis on DOM in Sarnámi. We're now preparing an article together.
Subjunctive and Agreement: Comparing Romance and Dravidian (with Madhusmitha Venkatesan)
status: ongoing
Verb Movement and DOM (with Diego Pescarini)
Status: ongoing
Does V-movement extend domains?
Indo-Aryan Microvariation and Ergativity (with Pritha Chandra)
Status: ongoing
We're studying alignment shift in Western Indo-Aryan languages and dialects
Alignment in Romance and Indo-Aryan (with Pritha Chandra)
status: ongoing
3/ Heritage Language Syntax & Language Contact
Null Subjects in Heritage Languages (with Alberto Frasson)
Status: draft in preparation
Adjectives and agreement in Heritage Tamil (with Madhusmitha Venkatesan and Pritha Chandra)
Status: ongoing
Ethical considerations when researching heritage languages (with Pritha Chandra and Mike Putnam)
Status: paper published.
Heritage Chinese Resumptive Pronouns (with Zetao Xu and Victor Pan)
Status: Are there Third Factor Effects in Language Contact? Evidence from Heritage Chinese; paper presented at SMOG, South Korea
Sociolinguistic Constraints on Language Change in Contact (with Suzanne Aalberse and Zetao Xu)
Status: under review
Language change in contact vs change in diachrony (with Mike Putnam and Silvia Terenghi)
Status: one paper published: as "Syntactic change in diachrony versus contact-induced change: Two sides of the same coin?", The Linguistic Review 42(4), 2025.
Ongoing project
Dynamic Syntax in contact (with Liliana Sánchez and Mike Putnam)
Status: In preparation
Modeling dynamic syntactic change and structural stability in heritage language communities under contact.
Heritage Language Data Elicitation (with Laia Colina-Fortuny and M. Carmen Parafita Couto)
Status: paper published: Collecting data in understudied language varieties: A methodological note, Nordlyd
In this paper we show that different elicitation techniques can sensibly affect the results, and consequently our understanding of the outcome of change in contact