I'm developing this page! For now, you can see where I've presented and published.
Against morphological operations
Acedo-Matellán, V.* & Gvozdovaitė, V.* (Accepted). Syntax proposes, prosody decides: On Lithuanian si. Linguistic Inquiry. [pdf]
One of the motivating cases for Local Dislocation (a morphology-specific reordering operation) was the Lithuanian reflexive 'si', which may appear as a prefix or a suffix. Here, we provide new data and generalizations about its linearization. We argue that its variable placement is due to prosody, not a morphological operation. We liken this to the linearization of clitics in Portuguese, as well as several other prosodically sensitive elements crosslinguistically.
Lithuanian ablaut is span-conditioned allomorphy: a case against readjustment. Poster presented at NELS 57, NYC, October 2026. [pdf]
In pieces: item interactions in the Lithuanian ‘past stem’. Qualifying paper at NYU, 2026.
Allo-interactions of three elements
An argument against allosemy from R-nominals: Non-compositionality requires non-terminal interpretation. Poster presented at CLS 62, Chicago, April 2026. [pdf]
I argue against existing treatments of R(eferring)-nominals. Using data from Lithuanian, where deverbal R-nominals contain two pieces of verbal morphology, I contend that neither complex-head nor phrase-embedding approaches to nominalization structures can generate all and only the attested R-readings. In particular, I work out the predictions made by the contextual allosemy account of nominalization ambiguity (Wood 2023) and argue that this approach overgenerates and undergenerates R-nominals. This is because the R-nominal meaning emerges from an interaction of three elements, which contextual allosemy cannot accommodate.
Allomorphy and allosemy in Lithuanian zero-nominals. Talk given at WCCFL 44, Mexico City, May 2026.
Shah, M. & Gvozdovaitė, V. Contextual allosemy and complex heads: architectural problems. Poster presented at the 5th CreteLing, July 2023. [pdf]
Argument structure
Separation of arguments: consequences for dependents of nouns. Poster presented at the 12th MACSIM at Rutgers, October 2026. [pdf]
Schein (2017) presents an argument in favor of the separation of arguments from the verbal predicate, using the modal adverb ‘possibly’ (see also Williams 2015). I show that this argument carries over to the nominal domain: namely (i) to relational nouns and (ii) to deverbal (eventive) nominalizations, both of which have received projectionist approaches to their argument structure. If Schein’s argument is along the right lines, then likewise, (i) the nominal dependent of relational nouns ('the edge of the table') cannot be introduced by the head noun (pace Barker 1991 et seq.), and (ii) the internal argument of complex event nominalizations ('the destruction of the city') is separated just like in its verbal counterpart, a problem for the allosemic approach (Wood 2023).
Telicity is two-fold: evidence from verbal prefixes and internal arguments in Lithuanian. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 32.1: Proceedings of PLC 49. [pdf]
Counting on the Verb: A study of aspectual effects on nominal structure in Lithuanian. MPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2024.
* indicates equal contribution.