About Me

I am a cognitive scientist and linguist and most of my research is concerned syntax and its interfaces. I also do some research on Artificial Intelligence (in particular LLMs).

Most of my published research is concerned with sound-meaning pairings, and the nature of that relation. I’m interested in the way that the Saussurian model, in which sound and meaning are two sides of the same coin fails, that is things like idioms, or morpheme distributions that do not correspond to a single meaning. I have been exploring the degree to which restrictions on these “divergences” (ways in which there is more structure between the “two sides”) can be accounted for in general syntactic terms, such as phrases or containment, and I have been doing so in a set-theoretic/minimalist kind of framework called Nanosyntax.