Research

Nominalisation

I am particularly interested in (clausal) nominalisation and what it can tell us about the interactions between nominal and clausal structures. Two key research questions I explore are: 1) What is the range of variation in the sizes of the nominal and clausal layers within nominalisations? and 2) What constraints, if any, govern the formation of nominalised clauses, and what are their sources? The Mongolic languages, which feature a rich array of nominalised structures, provide an ideal context for investigating these questions. My dissertation research, which focuses on nominalised embedded clauses in Khalkha Mongolian, also demonstrates how a detailed understanding of their structures can shed light on the locality of binding domains, the nature of case assignment, and differential subject marking.

Plurals

I am also interested in various plural constructions, particularly wh-reduplication and plural pronoun constructions (PPCs). In collaboration with Seoyeon Jang, I am investigating the reduplication of wh-items to signal plurality in interrogative questions. Our work examines how different attachment sites of a reduplicative head can account for varying morphological profiles of wh-reduplication across Khalkha Mongolian, Korean, and Turkish, and whether this framework can be extended to general crosslinguistic reduplicative patterns. Additionally, I am exploring PPCs in Mongolic, where morphologically plural pronouns are interpreted as singular within coordinate-like structures. Mongolic PPCs exhibit typologically unusual properties, leading me to focus on two key questions: 1) Why do Mongolic PPCs differ from those in other languages? and 2) What do PPCs reveal about the internal morphosyntax of DPs and plural pronouns?

Singlish

I have extended my research interests to include contact-induced and sociolinguistic variation and change in Singlish, a dynamic contact variety of English spoken in Singapore which incorporates elements from Southern Min, Cantonese, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil. In collaboration with Wil Gonzales, Mohamed Hafiz, Mie Hiramoto, and Jakob Leimgruber, we have investigated these phenomena using data from CoSEM, a corpus of Singlish text messages that we co-developed. We are particularly interested in investigating ongoing innovations and grammatical changes in Singlish and how these linguistic shifts reflect broader social trends in contemporary Singapore.