I'm a Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. 

 

Before coming to Edinburgh, I was an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Konstanz, and prior to that, a member of the DFG-funded Questions at the Interfaces research unit at Konstanz. I received my PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019.  

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I'm interested in how semantic, pragmatic and morpho-syntactic factors interact to give rise to restrictions on form-meaning mappings. My work explores this question specifically in the context of 'information packaging', including how speakers use different types of constructions to structure discourse, communicate bias or commitments to truth, use language to represent information as hypothesis vs. fact, or how we communicate ideas by talking about our thoughts, feelings and beliefs.

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My work integrates theoretical and experimental perspectives, using experimental and quantitative methods including corpus data and statistical modelling to inform theoretical and empirical questions about structure and meaning in natural language.

Topics I have worked on include:
 

syntax-semantics interface ∙ syntax-discourse interface ∙ morpho-semantics ∙ attitude reports ∙ selection ∙ clausal complementation ∙ factivity ∙ nominal semantics ∙ speech acts ∙ presupposition ∙ main clause phenomena ∙ copular sentences ∙ argument structure ∙ island effects ∙ exhaustivity ∙ focus and at-issueness ∙ variation and change

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My research has been funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the AHRC, and various smaller reserach grants, including a MindCORE ILST Research Grant for innovative interdisciplinary research in mind and brain, and a Teece Fellowship for interdisciplinary empirical or field-based applied research in the physical and social sciences.

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Collaborators: Luke Adamson, Akiva Bacovcin, Spencer Caplan, Donka Farkas, Caroline Heycock, Deniz Özyıldız, Hannah Rohde, Maribel Romero, Florian Schwarz, Jeremy Zehr
 

Networks and affiliations:

• The British Academy Early Career Research Network

• MECORE: Cross-linguistic investigation of meaning-driven combinatorial restrictions  restrictions in clausal embedding

 

Note - the "aj" cluster in Kajsa is pronounced like the English PRICE vowel [aɪ], and my pronouns are she/her
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