Hi!👋🏼

I am a fifth-year PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at Rutgers University. I am broadly interested in how language is structured and how structural properties interact with meaning. My research interests span syntax, semantics and their interface, with a particular focus on agreement, anaphora and demonstratives. I investigate linguistic phenomena through both theoretical analysis and experimental methods.

News

📰Shannon Bryant and I will present on long-distance dependency of reflexives in Mandarin fragment answers at WCCFL 44 [abstract]

📰Dorothy Ahn and I presented on kind-denoting demonstratives at LingDem, a special session of SuB 2025 [abstract] [proceedings draft]

Research

Agreement and reference

I am currently working on my dissertation on agreement, examining how referentiality influences agreement patterns in complex nominals and quantified phrases.

Long-distance binding of Mandarin reflexives in fragment answers

I observe that the complex reflexive taziji in Mandarin Chinese is more likely to take a non-local antecedent in fragment answers than in full sentential structures. Based on novel arguments from the blocking effect on ziji and preposition matching, I argue that fragment answers in Mandarin are derived from deletion of full syntactic structures. I propose that taziji moves from the embedded clause to the left periphery, followed by ellipsis of the remaining TP to create a long-distance binding in fragments.

Kind-referring demonstratives

I argue that demonstratives can form kind-denoting expressions and support this claim with novel evidence from Xi’anese demonstratives and their English counterparts. I also provide a formal analysis of how this kind-based interpretation is derived, incorporating a slight modification to the canonical semantics of demonstratives.