I am a Fellow by Examination (equivalent to a postdoc) at Magdalen College at the University of Oxford. My primary interests are in the syntax-semantics interface and the syntax-prosody mapping, with an empirical focus on ellipsis (silent syntactic structure) and focus in coordination. I want to understand the match and mismatch between syntax, meaning and sounds: to what extent can we derive meaning from syntax, and to what degree are hierarchical syntactic structure and linear prosodic structure similar and different? When I study meaning, I am not only interested in the literal meaning of words, but also their implied meanings: for example, how do we use coordinators like but to organize and negotiate the discourse? I use a mix of research methods, both theoretical and experimental, including phonetic analysis and statistical methods. I draw on evidence from many different languages, with primary focus on English and Mandarin Chinese.

I think theoretical linguistics should connect and interact with fields that explore the same questions using different methods, such as experimental linguistics and computational linguistics. I also think that linguistics is ultimately a part of cognitive science, and hope that all the proposals I make about human language are cognitively realistic, learnable and evolvable.

In efforts to bridge linguistics, cognitive science and computer science, I co-organized a workshop at Oxford called “Does ChatGPT know language as humans do?”, and created a linguistics course for cognitive scientists and computer scientists at MIT.