I am a fifth-year PhD candidate at the Department of Linguistics, UCLA. I am broadly interested in syntax, semantics, and especially their interface. My research connects generative syntax and formal semantics on topics including quantification and scope theory, relativization, clausal complementation, reconstruction effects, binding and cumulativity.
My dissertation investigates the scope-taking mechanisms of quantificational noun phrases, in particular the syntactic and semantics constraints that govern them. It probes this issue by exploring the restrictive hypothesis that quantificational scope is clause-bounded (Chomsky 1975; May 1977) and apparent counterexamples to it in a variety of clause-embedding constructions cross-linguistically (Moltmann and Szabolcsi 1994; Fox and Sauerland 1996; Farkas and Giannakidou 1996; Sharvit 1999; Hulsey and Sauerland 2006; Barker 2022). I am advised by Ethan Poole and Yael Sharvit. My other committee members are Dylan Bumford and Tim Hunter.
My first name is pronounced as [xweɪleɪ] (the first consonant is a velar fricative but you can use [h] if that's easier), and with tones [xweɪ˥˩leɪ˩˨].