About me
I am currently a student in the MPhil Linguistics program at UCL. My research areas are psycholinguistics, semantics, and pragmatics. My advisers are Prof. Wing Yee Chow and Prof. Richard Breheny. I graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA in Linguistics and a BA in Psychology. There I worked with Prof. Ming Xiang.
My research interest is in the effect of discourse context on sentence processing and interpretation. To borrow from Stalnaker and Roberts’ models, a discourse includes the interlocuters’ beliefs (and thus a common ground), some question under discussion that partitions the context set, and the speech acts performed to update the context. On a higher level, the discourse also involves the interlocutors’ goals, identity, and the general conversational setting. I am interested in 1) how these discourse factors give rise to rich multilayered linguistic meaning, and 2) how we process sentences under their influence.
In a longer term, I hope to study language not only as a tool for the exchange of information, but also as a medium of power and identity. Many semantic and pragmatic research topics have potential real-world implications on the role of language in society. The semantics of truth, lies, and bullshit may connect to media and misinformation. Vagueness and ambiguity are often exercised as a form of political power, and so is humor. I believe the study of theoretical semantics/pragmatics and the study of language in society can benefit from each other.