I’ve been fascinated by language, its structure and how it makes us human for as long as I can remember. After completing an undergraduate degree in German and Linguistics at Exeter College, Oxford, I moved to St Hilda’s College, Oxford to read for an MPhil in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology. My thesis supervisor was Mary Dalrymple, and my research focussed on double object constructions in modern English, showing that many analyses of the phenomena are theoretically problematic and empirically unjustified. I argued that neither of the two objects in a DOC is more object-like than the other, at least in DOCs involving verbs that pattern semantically like bill.
I’m currently working on a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Manchester with Kersti Börjars and George Walkden. My research has taken a turn towards the more historical, and I am focussing on diachronic German syntax. In particular, I am looking at auxiliary ellipsis/the ‘afinite construction’ in Early Modern German, which hasn’t received much empirical or theoretical attention up to now. I hope to be able to provide both diachronic and synchronic theoretical accounts for the phenonenon, as well as shedding some light on how it came into being and why it is no longer grammatical in Modern German.
Quirky Case 