Madhusmitha Venkatesan

Hello! I am Madhusmitha [mədʰʊsmɪt̪ɑ], a PhD Candidate at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.

A generative syntactician in the making, my current work focuses on the structural configurations underlying gender agreement with a specific focus on asymmetrically bilingual grammars. My research is empirically grounded in Tamil spoken in New Delhi. When Tamil is acquired as the first language by speakers growing up in a geographical location where the dominant societal language is Hindi-Urdu, Tamil develops as a heritage grammar for these speakers. My research questions revolve around understanding how the syntax of gender assignment and agreement arise in this particular bilingual context. Essentially, I plan to understand the development of gender in heritage Tamil from both representational and derivational perspectives.

I am part of the SynDaC Research Group at IIT Delhi, headed by Prof. Pritha Chandra, where I am being jointly supervised by  Pritha Chandra and Roberta D'Alessandro. 

You can download my CV here.