About me
I earned my PhD in Linguistics in 2010, at Simon Fraser University. Under the guidance of my supervisor, Chung-hye Han, my thesis is on the application of Synchronous Tree Adjoining grammar to co-referential, bound variable, and synthetic reflexives. During my degree, I also studied as an “exchange” student at the University of British Columbia, attended the 2007 LSA Summer Institute at Stanford, and spent a term as a visiting post-graduate worker at the University of Edinburgh. My work during these years was mainly focused on English, Japanese, and Korean, through corpus and experimental studies at SFU, and Shona beginning with Field Methods at UBC. And yes, my office as a PhD student was basically in Caprica City.
After graduation, I moved on to a SSHRC-funded post-doc in the Linguistics Department at Yale University. Here, I spent most of my time working on Tree Adjoining Grammar-related projects with Bob Frank, though I was also able to find some local Shona consultants and refine the work from my thesis. I stayed an extra year at Yale as an instructor, developing a course on practical methods for corpus and experimental data collection in theoretical syntax and semantics, while also teaching syntax and morphology. It was also at this time that I became interested in looking at micro variations in English pronoun paradigms, inspired by the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project and its members. For the first two years at Yale, this rotunda was part of my daily walk to and from the office.
In 2013, I arrived at the University of Calgary, first as a limited term faculty member, and now an Associate Professor of Linguistics in the School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures. Thanks largely to the graduate students under my supervision, I have expanded my research to Persian, supervising projects on the complex predicates and ditransitives of the language, and publishing work on raising verbs, negation and binding, the last of which was part of a SSHRC project on examining non-structural influences on reference resolution via eye-tracking. I have also contributed to projects on indexical shift in ASL and Turkish, along with more work on raising, after supervising two very different projects on expletive pronoun deletion in English and copy raising in Turkish. Currently, I am working on a long-term project in my lab, exploring the impact of trial item content, especially expressions of gender, on psycholinguistic experiments. This is one of my favourite views of Calgary, floating eastward into the city, much like my move from Vancouver to the other side of the Rocky Mountains.
During my time in Calgary, I have primarily taught courses in the core syntax curriculum, along with Typology and Introduction to Linguistics. I have also turned the practical skills course I first developed at Yale into an ever-evolving course on python programming and experiment design. In Calgary, I have developed a course on the History of Linguistic thought, being taught for the third time in 2024. As of Summer 2024, I have supervised to completion two PhD students, five MA students, and five honours BA students in Linguistics. I also spent two years as the Undergrad Advisor for the Linguistics program, two as Division Chair for Linguistics, and three as Associate Director of the School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures. From 2018 to 2023 I served as the Secretary of the Canadian Linguistic Association. From 2015-19, I was one of the founding members of the Equity and Diversity Committee for the Faculty of Arts, where my main contribution was to work on our Faculty’s, and ultimately the entire University’s, presence at Calgary Pride. This picture is from a 2018 photo shoot for a university news article connected to that work, and is the only professionally-taken photo on this website (the rest are mine). This Equity and Diversity work has definitely influenced my recent research, looking at questions of whether gender identity and gender bias interacts with language processing.
Though I’ve been in Calgary since 2013, I still make it back to Vancouver as much as possible. I lived there for just over 30 years, and aside from school, I spent most of 2008 to 2010 working on and off in the tourism sector. Though it has now long been disassembled, I was trained to operate the first ever IMAX 3D projector system (admittedly many years after it was built, but while it was still using real celluloid film and reel-to-reel audio). From there, I worked for Hostelling International, where I honed my ability to stay up all night doing problem solving and data entry work, a bad habit that has still stuck. This here is from my old neighbourhood in Vancouver, on the patio of one of the two coffee shops where I used to bring piles of reading and grading as a TA.