About Me

I am a theoretical syntactician, specializing in modern generative syntax in the Chomskyan tradition, with a strong empirical focus.  My research has focused particularly on ellipsis and other null anaphora constructions, and particularly on Modern Hebrew.

I was incredibly fortunate to learn what linguistics was and begin studying it during my freshman year as an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz.  I completed my BA with honors from the UCSC Linguistics Department in 1993, and returned to complete an MA in Linguistics there, graduating in 1998. While there, I worked and learned from all of the faculty, and particularly Jim McCloskey, Sandy Chung, Jorge Hankamer, and Judith Aissen.  I went on to PhD work in the Linguistics Department of McGill University, finishing in 2005, with a dissertation supervised by Lisa Travis and (as an external member) Jason Merchant—and in the meantime letting myself soak up all of the wonderful aspects of living in Montréal, Québec.

After visiting positions in Linguistics at Northwestern University and UC Berkeley, I began working at Brandeis University in Fall 2005.  At the time, linguistics here consisted of a small undergraduate program of about 20 majors, largely unconnected to a separate small group of computational linguistics PhD students and researchers working with James Pustejovsky in the CS Department.  In the years since, Brandeis linguistics has grown to our present size of about 60 undergraduate majors who focus on theoretical generative linguistics, along with about 65 graduate students in theoretical and computational linguistics.  In addition to PhD students, the latter group now includes the roughly 45 students in our MS Program in computational linguistics, which was started in 2009, and which includes many students who themselves studied theoretical linguistics prior to entering.  Gradually, we have grown into a lively and collegial community of undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and researchers all engaged in the scientific study of language from a number of formal angles.

Since early on at UC Santa Cruz, I have always been deeply interested in all of the core subfields of theoretical linguistics, and in work that blends careful empirical description with theoretical accounts that are insightful, well-constructed, and well-argued-for.  Within this, natural language syntax has always been my strongest area of interest, and it continues to be my core focus.  I have added corpus linguistics and corpus development for theoretical linguistic analysis to this, in recent years. 

At Brandeis, I teach theoretical linguistics, linguistic typology, and research methods through the advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate levels, direct the Syntax Research Lab, and have held a range of administrative roles for our undergraduate Linguistics Program and MS Program in Computational Linguistics, currently serving as Vice Chair of both.