About
I am a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where I am advised by Florian Schwarz and am affiliated with the Penn Meaning Lab. My doctoral studies are supported by the Benjamin Franklin Fellowship.
I study linguistic meaning using formal, experimental, and diachronic methods, with an empirical focus on Mandarin and Classical Chinese. An overview of my work, together with my publications and presentations, lives on the Research & Output page.
Before coming to Penn, I received an MSc in Linguistics with Distinction from the University of Edinburgh (2022), with a dissertation on believe as an implicature trigger supervised by Wataru Uegaki and Ciyang Qing, and a BA in Persian from Shanghai International Studies University (2021), where I was named a Distinguished University Graduate of Shanghai.
I am a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese, fluent in English, have working proficiency in Persian, and have done fieldwork on Kono (Sierra Leone).
News
- May 2026“The Story of a Light Verb Modal in Chinese” (with Paloma Jeretič) presented at NACCL-38, George Washington University; the proceedings paper is to appear
- Apr 2026Invited talk on interpreting negation under yiqian ‘before’ at the Negation Network.
- Feb 2026Presented “Two Types of Definites in Kono (Sierra Leone)” at PLC 50 at Penn, where I also chaired the Pragmatics session; the paper is to appear in PWPL 33.1.
- Oct 2025Presented work on negation at MACSIM 11, Johns Hopkins University.
- Sep 2025Posters at Sinn und Bedeutung 30 (Goethe University Frankfurt) and XPrag 2025 (University of Cambridge); the SuB 30 proceedings paper is to appear.
Contact
Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
3401-C Walnut Street, Suite 300
Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA