Doctoral Candidate, University of Toronto

Student. Researcher. Global Citizen.

Who am I?

The relationship between language and culture is deeply rooted and in constant flux, from the things we choose to discuss to changing the way we speak with colleagues, strangers, and loved ones. Yet even in its day-to-day application, language itself is a systematically structured system, one constantly opening itself to all manner of scientific inquiry.

I am a doctoral candidate in linguistics at the University of Toronto specializing in language documentation, historical linguistics, minimalist syntax, and lexical semantics. I work predominantly in Central Mexico with speakers of Nahuatl, a Uto-Aztecan language, and Tének, a Mayan language, in the state of San Luis Potosí. I also language change in French, Spanish, and Italian, both in the new and Old Worlds.

About my work

Research

A quick look at language in flux.

My Doctoral Work

I am currently writing a doctoral dissertation on various grammatical resources that speakers of Huasteca Nahuatl to express spatial relations. In doing so, I seek to answer the following questions:

1) What morphological and syntactic units are employed in Huasteca Nahuatl to express spatial relations?

2) What evidence is there of grammaticalization and degrammaticalization in Contemporary Huasteca Nahuatl from earlier stages of the language, such as Classical Nahuatl?

This thesis seeks to enrich the cross-linguistic typology of the evolution of case markers and adpositions from relational nouns by challenge the association of concept to morphosyntactic form when a single morpheme can realize itself as any of the above.

Keywords: Nahuatl, grammaticalization, minimalist syntax, distributed morphology

This project is financed by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)'s Doctoral Reseach Grant.

A Study in Bilingual Speech (Unpublished Manuscript: Univeristy of Toronto Generals Paper)

This paper offers an account of the environments in which the Spanish morpheme de has transferred into Huasteca Nahuatl, a variety of Nahuatl spoken in North-Central Mexico. It presents the results of a linguistic interviews with two native speakers of Huasteca and illustrates how these Nahuatl-Spanish bilinguals use de in Nahuatl. The results suggest that the use of de in their speech is easily interchangeable with semantically and functionally equivalent adpositional elements in Huasteca Nahuatl such as tlen and ika in their function as lexical adpositions expressing Source, Accompaniment, and Instrument, among others.

Keywords: Nahuatl, Spanish, codeswitching, language change, adpositions

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Old French to Modern French Honorifics

Cross-linguistic expressions of deference are subject to a high degree of variation. For example, the inventory of honorific titles in French can be divided into two groups based on the titles’ behaviour in different syntactic environments. Titles derived from Old French honorifics, such as Madame and Monsieur, do not take a definite article in argument position when paired with a proper name in expressions such as Madame Bovary or Monsieur Poirot. However, titles like Docteur, Professeur, Présidente, etc. are always preceded by a definite article in argument position and when paired with a proper name, such as le Docteur Watson or la Professeure Pellérin. The current study looks at the internal structure of French DPs containing honorific titles and proposes that Old French honorifics behave as functional elements while modern professional titles as part of a nominal compound. Thus, I argue that the differences between different kinds of French honorifics is the result of their distribution in the nominal projection.

Keywords: Morphosyntax, French, diachronic linguistics, nominal domain, names

You can find a copy here.