“Quasi-Denial”: (Counter-)Expectation, Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality

More recently, I have been working to introduce a class of utterances which I call “Quasi-Denial”: epistemically-modalized denials which depart from the standard truth-conditional picture of negated epistemic utterances. Such sentences exhibit curious context-sensitivity in expressing underspecified speaker attitudes of skepticism. The work was recently presented at ICFL-8 in Hangzhou, China. This project is very much in its formative stages, but slides and a manuscript will be made available shortly; if you would like to request a copy, please feel free to reach out to me.

Complex Directional Constructions in Mandarin Chinese

I spent the latter half of my undergraduate years studying the phrase structure of directional constructions containing motion deixis, particularly in Mandarin. A single puzzle involving the distribution of locative vs. non-locative objects (first observed in Chao 1968) constituted the bulk of my senior thesis, which I successfully defended on May 9th, 2016. Since graduation, my research broadened to focus on understanding linguistic and pragmatic demands for the interpretation of location, particularly in the context of utterances involving motion; how such observations figure into the encoding of viewpoint deixis; and their role in syntactic and semantic theory.