I am a linguist working on semantics, pragmatics, and syntax of natural language elements that relate utterances to context, such as determiners, pronouns, person agreement markers, and wh-words. I use formal theoretical and computational methods to model their use and their role in language change.
I am a postdoctoral fellow of Research Foundation Flanders at Ghent University. I received my PhD in Linguistics from McGill University in 2014 with a dissertation "Grammatical Ingredients of Definiteness".
Ongoing and recent projects:
Corpora
Middle Dutch. I am working on a parsed corpus of Middle Dutch (PCMD), designed as a Penn-style treebank, with Gertjan Postma, Anne Breitbarth, Anne Carlier (Sorbonne Université), Melissa Farasyn, and Freek Van de Velde. This is still a young project, so if you are interested in participating, please feel free to contact me.
Meadow Mari. I am working on a morphologically annotated (FST-based analyzer) corpus of Meadow Mari, with Jeremy Bradley, Trond Trosterud, Anna Volkova, and Jorma Luutonen
Papers
Under revision. Semantic evolution of pre-nominal possessives: A comparative quantitative study of French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. Draft.
2020. (with Anne Carlier) Between demonstrative and definite: A grammar competition model of the evolution of French l-determiners Canadian Journal of Linguistics 65 (3). Paper.
2020. (with Anne Carlier) Givenness marking in a mixed system: Constituent order vs. determiners. Quantification and Scales in Change (Language Science Press), ed. R. Gergel and J. F. Watkins, 203-233. Paper.
2019. (with Benoît Crabbé and Sophie Prévost) Agreement syncretization and the loss of null subjects: quantificational models for Medieval French. Language Variation and Change 31(3), 275–301. Paper.
2019. (with Bernhard Schwarz and David Oshima) Factive islands from necessary blocking. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 29, ed. K. Blake, F. Davis, K. Lamp, and J. Rhyne, 529–548. Paper.
2019. (with Anastasiia Voznesenskaia) An emerging veridical complementizer to čto in Russian. Festschrift for Liliane Haegeman. Paper.
2018. (with Benoît Crabbé and Sophie Prévost) Effects of text form on grammatical changes: A treebank study. Diachronica 35(3), 394–429. Paper.
Conference presentations
(with Anne Carlier) Simulating the role of pragmatic reasoning in word order changes. Formal Diachronic Semantics 4. The Ohio State University. November 15-16 2019. Slides.
