Starting 2026, I will be a Postdoc at the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, being part of Tamás Halm's project on Radically Truncated Clauses.

I defended my PhD thesis on October 3 of 2025 at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, where my advisor was Maria Polinsky (and co-advised by Eric Potsdam, University of Florida).

I work primarily in formal syntax and I am particularly interested in Noun Phrase structure. I am currently focusing on the syntax of small structures. Besides the new focus on Radically Truncated Clauses, I'll keep looking at small nominals. 

Fieldwork is my second nature (actually, my first nature). Since my first year of undergraduate studies, I have been working with Finno-Ugric languages, primarily Moksha and Hill Mari, but also Izhma Komi, Khanty, Hungarian and Beserman. Lately, I started studying Kaqchikel and K'iche', Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala.

I received my Bachelor’s and Master's Degrees at the department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. My advisors there were Svetlana Toldova and Ekaterina Lyutikova. My BA thesis was about Morphosyntax of noun phrase in Moksha and Hill Mari, and my MA thesis was an elaboration of this study: Morphosyntax of noun phrase in Finno-Ugric languages of the Volga Region. These are written in Russian, and I am now working on the development of these ideas in English-language publications. This is my qualifying paper on the status of inherent case based on Moksha data, which I recently wrote to advance to candidacy.

Here, you can see my CV.

My legal name is Neumann now, but I would like to stay Pleshak for the linguistic community.