I am a fourth-year grad student interested in minimalist syntax, syntax-semantics interface, comparative syntax, Chinese linguistics, bilingualism and language acquisition.

I work with Prof. Samuel D. Epstein and Prof. Acrisio Pires.

Recent research projects

1.    Prospectus/Dissertation: Investigation of non-subject A-movement

2.    [In progress] Causes of A-movement in Chinese: 

• Based on the distribution of A-movement in two types of raising modal constructions in Chinese, I argue that A-movement in Chinese is not motivated by EPP; rather, there are two distinct driving forces of A-movement in this language - Case feature and Topic feature.

3.    [In Syntax 2012] The syntax/semantics/pragmatics of Chinese wh-the-hell questions - addressing issues including:

• why the-hell is compatible with why but not with how come in Chinese
• the constraint on the person feature of the matrix subject in Chinese wh-the-hell questions involving long-distance covertmovement of daodi 'the hell'
• the possibility of having the [±discourse participant/±addresser] feature as the default identity of φ-features in Chinese as a language without morphological manifestation of φ-features
• the extension of the formal mechanism of point-of-view anchoring in Chinese wh-the-hell questions to the blocking effects of long-distance reflexives in Chinese.

4.    [Submitted] Argument displacement in Chinese raising modal constructions - addressing issues including:

• the derivation of object raising in Chinese raising modal construction as topic A-movement and its implication for Miyagawa's (2010) extension of feature inheritance to topic/focus feature
• a strictly derivational account of topic A-movement based on Bošković's (2007) moving-element-driven theory of movement, and the hypothesis that feature interpretability and feature valuation can be lexically dissociated (as in Pesetsky & Torrego 2006, Bošković to appear).    

5.    [With Acrisio Pires (UM)] 

• Chinese-English bilingual study concerning adult bilingual speakers' grammatical knowledge of null subject/object and long-   distance binding of reflexive.

6.    [With K-C. Jason Lin (NYU)] Long-distance agreement and topic A-movement in Formosan Austronesian languages.

• We argue that case-marking in Sinhala is not entirely determined by the volitivity of the predicate, as generally assumed in the literature.
• We note that whenever there is a competition between dative case marking and nominative case marking, the former always wins out. Based on this observation, we argue that dative case and nominative case are inherently different. 

8.    [With Tsung-Ying Chen (Alberta)] The characerization of Xiamen tone sandhi in terms of phase and Multiple Spell-Out.