My research was related to a number of topics, but I mostly worked on morphosyntactic innovation in Multicultural London English, taking methodological influences from both sociolinguistics and formal syntax and semantics. I am also interested in the different ways that definiteness is encoded across different languages, and how syntactic phenomena can affect the availability of a definite interpretation for noun phrases.

Grammatical innovation in Multicultural London English

After finishing my PhD I held an 8-month Post-doc position on the project Advancing the European Multilingual Experience (AThEME) at QMUL. I identified and analysed various grammatical innovations in Multicultural London English (MLE), including P-D-drop, a new pronoun man, and the new causal interrogative why...for. I am continuing now to investigate other grammatical innovations, including a cross-categorial degree modifier bare(s) the use of must've as an evidential (rather than an epistemic modal).

More recently, I've been working with Christian Ilbury (Edinburgh) and Jack Grieve (Birmingham) on the spread of MLE lexical items throughout the UK, using Twitter data.

Definiteness

Through my PhD research I became interested in the different ways that definiteness is encoded across different languages, and how syntactic phenomena can affect the availability of a definite interpretation for noun phrases. Part of the empirical focus of my thesis was the varying interpretation of bare nouns and classifier-noun constituents in various numeral classifier languages. I have argued that head movement accounts of definite interpretations in noun phrases in numeral classifer languages are undesirable.

My more recent work on P-D-drop in London English also involves some discussion of weak definiteness, and I am currently interested in the availability of a definite interpretation for bare count nouns in English.

Head movement

In my PhD research, I argued that, under the assumption that the mapping between syntax and semantics is homomorphic, employing movement operations which do not have semantic effects as an explanatory tool for understanding word-order variation cross-linguistically is undesirable. I argued for the non-existence of head movement as a narrow syntactic operation, on the grounds that it does not produce semantic effects, and I explained apparent head movement effects in terms of the nature of the spell-out operation which maps syntactic structure to phonology. I proposed a Direct Linearization theory in which word-order effects purported to be the result of movement can be derived without appeal to any narrow syntactic operations; the explanatory burden shifts onto the mapping from syntax to phonology, which allows more than one head in a continuous complement line to be spelled out as a single morphological unit.