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Hello! I am a linguist specializing in syntax and psycholinguistics with an interest in semantics. My work is mostly located at the interfaces of these three fields, particularly with respect to South Asian languages.

I am based at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Delhi (DU), India where I am an Assistant Professor. 

Some Recent News (see Research for more details):  

Research Interests and Collaborations

I collaborate with a number of colleagues on sentence processing in Hindi. I have worked with Dr. Brian Dillon on  agreement processing, and am working to extend this work to other Indian languages at the moment. I am also working on the nature of prediction and forgetting in head final languages with Dr. Samar Husain (IIT, Delhi). 

I work on a number of topics related to syntax and the syntax-semantics interface. I have collaborated with Dr Rajesh Bhatt on various projects related to the syntax of Hindi-Urdu, particularly focusing on agreement and case. I am also working on the syntax of person and number hierarchies in agreement Ojibwe, Cree and Dumi with collaborators, Dr. Ekaterina Vostrikova and Dr. Leland Kusmer. In addition,  I have worked on scope parallelism in sluicing (with Dr. Jyoti Iyer) and (anti)-subject orientation in binding (with Dr. Ethan Poole), argument structure of causatives and the nature of focus marking in Hindi-Urdu. I have also worked on Hindi-English code-switching as part of my M. Phil. and also on zyaadaa-comparatives with Dr. Jyoti Iyer and Dr. Gurmeet Kaur.

Previous Academic Experience

Before joining DU, I was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics, Central University of Rajasthan (CURAJ), where I was among the first set of faculty at the (then) newly founded department. I was involved in teaching various Linguistics courses of the 5-year Integrated M.Sc. Linguistics and Language Sciences Program and in various activities related to student mentorship and research orientation development.  I have begun documentation of the agreement systems of the languages of Rajasthan with students from CURAJ as part of my broad interest in understanding the agreement landscape of the languages of North-Western India (ongoing work). I am also working with students from CURAJ on documenting properties of various discourse particles in their languages.  In addition, I was involved in teaching courses related to language and communication to the larger University student community, which got me thinking about multilingualism in the Indian context once again (more on this front soon!).  

Prior to joining CURAJ, I was a post-doctoral researcher investigating the production of pronouns in Hindi with Dr. Kumiko Fukumura (University of Stirling, Scotland) and Dr. Samar Husain (Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi). 

I completed my Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2019.  My dissertation, Computing agreement in a mixed system, explores the mixed agreement grammar of the language Hindi-Urdu.  The dissertation covers new empirical and theoretical ground in two domains. One, the dissertation identifies and analyzes three kinds of atypical agreement patterns which are not accounted for under traditional syntactic approaches to Hindi-Urdu agreement -- verb agreement with the nominal component of Noun-Verb complex predicates, long distance agreement of embedding Adjective-Verb predicates with embedded infinitive clause objects, and copular agreement in identity copula structures. Two, the dissertation makes a novel contribution with respect to the question of how agreement is computed in real-time by investigating the conditions under which agreement attraction errors arise in Hindi-Urdu. I show that what makes a potent agreement 'attractor' in Hindi-Urdu is distinct from other languages and that this reflects the influence of Hindi-Urdu's distinct grammatical agreement system on processing. The dissertation was supported by the NSF DDRI Grant Program.