Research

My research focuses on the semantics of natural language, and its interface with syntax and pragmatics, typically from a cross-linguistic perspective. The topics I have worked on can be classified under four broad categories: Questions and relative clauses; Bare nominals and genericity; Free choice items; Syntactic structure of Hindi.

My current projects include:

• The Sortability Hypothesis: Optional Pluralization Strategies and Animacy Effects.
• The Sortability Hypothesis: Anti-singularity Implicatures in Questions in the absence of Singular Morphology.
• Unexpected scope/projection effects for singular bare nominal arguments in Russian and Hindi.
• Wh Scope-taking in Questions, a study of different aspects of scope taking involved in the interpretation of questions, with particular attention to multiple wh constructions, in preparation for Linguistic Inquiry Monographs.
• The role of intonation in (quasi-)subordination, with special reference to rhetorical questions and other constructions where intonation is the only signal differentiating distinct speech acts.
• Differences between ever-free relatives and any with respect to epistemic modality, the (in)compatibility of polarity items and definites, of plural morphology and free choice.
• The Hindi-Urdu additive particle bhii and the exclusive particle hii — their status as discourse particles, their semantic/pragmatic contributions, and their doubled counterparts: yehaaN tak ki …bhii & sirf…hii. A compositional account for their possible and impossible readings within the alternatives and exhaustification approach.