As part of a series of research profiles of Klarman Fellows, the Cornell Chronicle profiled me here.

My article “Demonstratives and visibility: Data from Ticuna and implications for theories of deixis” appears in the December 2021 issue of Language. The article’s abstract reads: In many Indigenous languages of the Americas, demonstratives are said to encode whether the referent is visible. Some scholars, however, argue that all visibility meanings in demonstratives are epiphenomenal on […]

I coauthored an article with David Peeters (Tilburg University & MPI Nijmegen) titled “Cross-linguistic differences in demonstrative systems: Comparing spatial and non-spatial influences on demonstrative use in Ticuna and Dutch.” The article has now been published in Journal of Pragmatics (DOI). The full text is available open access here via MPI Nijmegen’s open access platform. The […]

I delivered a talk at the 7th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation (ICLDC) titled “Documenting child language in an Indigenous Amazonian community.” Short abstract for the talk: Documenting child language in Indigenous settings is important for both language reclamation and first language acquisition research. I outline methods which researchers can use to integrate […]

My paper “Ticuna (tca) language documentation: A guide to materials in the California Language Archive” appeared this month in the journal Language Documentation & Conservation. (It was accepted in November 2020.) The abstract is: Ticuna (ISO: tca) is a language isolate spoken in the northwestern Amazon Basin (Brazil, Colombia, Peru). Ticuna has more speakers than […]

I accepted a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellowship (2021-2024) at Cornell University. The Klarman Fellowships “provide postdoctoral opportunities to early-career scholars of outstanding talent, initiative and promise. Among the most selective of its kind in the country, the program offers independence from constraints of particular grants, enabling the recipients to devote themselves to frontline, innovative research without […]

My paper “Countability in Ticuna” was accepted for publication at the open-access journal LIAMES/Línguas Indígenas Americanas, published in Brazil. The article is part of a special issue on the mass-count distinction in languages spoken in Brazil, edited by Suzi Lima (University of Toronto). The article abstract reads: This study examines the count-mass distinction in Ticuna (isolate). […]

At the annual business meeting of the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas on January 9, I received two awards: the Michael Krauss Archiving Award and the Mary R. Haas Book Award. The Archiving Award was given for my archival collections documenting Ticuna, while the Haas Award was given for my […]

I delivered a talk at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), titled “Children acquire non-egocentric demonstratives later than egocentric ones.” Abstract for the talk: Across languages, children produce demonstratives early in development, but do not master them until late. The late mastery of demonstratives is attributed to children’s cognitive egocentrism […]

I recently completed a manuscript titled “Anaphoric demonstratives occur with fewer and different pointing gestures than deictic demonstratives.” This manuscript is currently under review. The abstract is: Speakers often produce demonstratives, such as this/that and here/there, together with pointing gestures. However, little is known about what leads speakers to produce some demonstrative tokens with points, […]