I am a 6th-year Ph.D. candidate in the Linguistics Department at the University of Chicago interested, broadly, in semantics and its interfaces with syntax and pragmatics, language revitalization, and fieldwork. Some narrower keywords pertaining to my interests include (but are not limited to): modality, finiteness, attitudes, speech acts, clausal structure, and TAM. I have worked with a variety of languages, but I have a lasting commitment to my own Alaska Native community’s language of Western Aleut, which is critically endangered.

My dissertation will address degrees of clausal dependency in Aleut and the appearance of typically dependent clauses as independent sentences, a phenomenon which has been termed “insubordination” in the literature (Evans 2007). I hope to understand how a clause’s modal interpretation is connected to its syntactic structure and its sentential force.

I got my B.A. with Honors at Stanford University in Linguistics, where I was advised by Paul Kiparsky. I have also served as adjunct professor in the Alaska Native Studies program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.

You can find hyperlinks to available papers and presentations on my CV.