About me

I am a generative linguist, a syntactician by training, which means that in my theoretical work I try to model or reverse-engineer various syntactic phenomena and interface properties of natural languages in order to answer questions about language as a cognitive capacity, an innate property of the human mind. Formal linguistic research is traditionally conducted by focusing on grammar as a set of abstract, internalized rules, abstracting away from the social and psychological components of language use. In my current work I attempt to combine psychological aspects of certain sociolinguistic phenomena with formal linguistic modeling in order to address questions and solve problems that currently have no good solution within linguistics. For instance, by investigating the psychological underpinnings of linguistic behavior implicated in language contact situations, I hope to be able to describe the general mechanism by which emotions factor into contact-induced language change and thereby propose a general theory of contact induced language change. This work requires an interdisciplinary approach to the study of language, which has brought me to the Department of Psychology, where my team and I are investigating the role of emotions in language change as part of my FWF START project “The emotions we speak”.

My Curriculum Vitae

I have a PhD in Linguistics from Stony Brook University (2015)

I have been at the University of Graz since 2019. First, as a University Assistant with Doctorate at the Institute for Slavic studies (2019-2021), then as an FWF Senior Postdoctoral Researcher (2021 – 2025).

I have joined the Department of Psychology in August 2025 as a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher with the FWF START project “The emotions we speak” (2025-2030) and my team and I are in the process of establishing the Language and Emotion Lab.

Short biography

I have a PhD in Linguistics from Stony Brook University, USA, where I also obtained an MA in Linguistics. My doctoral research centered on issues pertaining to the syntax-semantics interface, specifically natural language quantification in free word order languages with the focus on Russian. After earning my PhD degree, I have done several postdocs, at the University of Vienna, the University of Connecticut, and the University of Graz. Before receiving the FWF START prize, I carried out an FWF Lise Meitner project “Deriving Discourse Configurationality of East Slavic”, which combined theoretical work on argument structure and the syntax-semantic interface with experimental prosodic and corpus investigation of Ukrainian and Russian word order and information structure.