about

I am an assistant professor at the UP Department of Linguistics where I have been teaching linguistics and Chinese Mandarin since 2009. As a linguist, I mainly conduct research on the morphosyntax of Philippine languages, the interface between form and meaning, as well as on the discourses around the use, acquisition and transmission of languages among Filipinos and within the Philippine context.  

Among the languages that I have worked on are Tagalog, Iraya Mangyan, and Buhid Mangyan. I have conducted fieldwork in Oriental Mindoro, Iloilo, and Davao del Norte where I collected linguistic data on Akeanon, Capizon, Kaagan, Mansaka, Tagakaulo, Hanunoo, Southern Sorsoganon, and Bangon.

At present, I am a PhD student at the University of Naples L'Orientale, where I am using an ethnographic approach to document the language attitudes and multilingual practices of first- and second-generation Filipino migrants living in the Campania region of Italy. My doctoral dissertation also aims to identify linguistic features that point to possible effects of language contact between Tagalog/Filipino and Italian.

I have been part of several research projects over the years. I continue to supervise the cataloguing and digitization of legacy language materials that are part of the Dr. Ernesto Constantino collection. This collection includes numerous raw data from over 100 Philippine languages which were collected between the 1960s and the late 1990s. I also headed the team that annotated a subset of the Leipzig University Tagalog corpus using the Universal Dependencies Framework. This Tagalog Universal Dependencies Treebank is composed of over 15,000 sentences with over 320,000 tokens crawled from the Internet. Other research projects that I have been involved in are listed in the projects section.

When I am not steeped in linguistics research, I dabble in graphic design and illustration. I have previously collaborated with other researchers in creating visual elicitation materials for a few experimental linguistic research projects. I also enjoy going on walks while wondering how an introvert such as myself got into a highly people-facing line of work...