HANDE SEVGİ

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Linguistics Department at Harvard University. I am interested in sign language linguistics which provides a different window to understand human language. In general, I am curious to discover to what extent the modality difference has an effect on the representation of the language in mind and on the realization of the language. In a narrower scope, I focus on the classifier constructions in sign languages that allegedly bear linguistic and non-linguistic properties due to their iconic nature. 

Before starting the Ph.D. program at Harvard University, I completed my MA degree in the Linguistics Department at Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. My thesis investigates the differences in language production and comprehension of early and late-learner Turkish Sign Language (TİD) signers to reveal any age of acquisition effects by focusing on complex structures such as classifiers and coordination.

Currently, I am working on the structural properties of sign language classifiers to provide a compositional analysis that can capture their properties in addition to the co-speech gestures in the verbal domain and their interactions with logical operators, i.e., negation.

My CV can be found here.