Lily Xu

Welcome! 

I'm a sixth-year graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA. 

My main research interests lie in phonology, especially its interface with morphology. I use experimental and computational methods to understand how people acquire and represent (morpho)phonological knowledge. I'm also interested in Semitic languages and Arabic in particular. 

I am planning to defend my dissertation in Winter 2026. My committee members are Megha Sundara (co-chair), Claire Moore-Cantwell (co-chair), Bruce Hayes, and Laurel Perkins. 

Recent updates: 

• I will be presenting a poster titled "Morphologically specific constraints are learned over general for Arabic OCP" at OCP23.  

• My paper "Nonconcatenative morphological domains constrain phonotactics: a case study of Egyptian Arabic" just came out in Phonology. [link]

About me: 

My name in Chinese is Xi Xu (许希), but I go by Lily because of the difficulty of guessing how the x is pronounced and a minimal word restriction that is at least active in my idiolect. My last name can be pronounced as [ɕỳ] (true to Mandarin) or [ʃu] (more anglicized), but is not pronounced [zu] (prithee) or [xu].