I'm Greg (he/him), a 5th-year PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. My dissertation supervisor is Daphna Heller, and my committee members are Michela Ippolito and Craig Chambers.
I work primarily within the intersections of semantics and psycholinguistics. I'm interested in cross-linguistic patterns involving referring expressions, definiteness, and plurality. My dissertation explores these topics in determinerless languages like Mandarin Chinese and Labrador Inuttitut, via elicited production studies.
I am deeply interested in language documentation, ethical fieldwork practices, and the description and analysis of understudied languages. My work on Labrador Inuttitut is embedded within the Inuttitut Verb Class Project (PI: Susana Bejar). Earlier in my graduate studies, I conducted descriptive and theoretical work on semantic aspects of Macuxi (Cariban), an indigenous language spoken in Brazil, Guyana and Venezuela, on topics including pluractionality, space and motion.
I'm also an ongoing research assistant for the Language Profiles Project (PI: Avery Ozburn), an initiative to include and contextualize under-represented languages within the teaching of linguistics in university classrooms. In my department, I also serve as co-Editor of the Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics.
My work is supported by a Doctoral Fellowship (2021-25) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and a Jackman Junior Fellowship from the Jackman Humanities Institute (2020–24).
Updates:
Upcoming:
January 2025: my co-authors and I from the Inuttitut Project will be presenting a talk 'Declarative questions in Labrador Inuttitut' at the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) annual meeting online.
March 2025: we will also be presenting a talk'Towards a community-centered Labrador Inuttitut corpus: Capacity Building with ELAN' at the 9th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation in Honolulu, Hawai‘i.
July 2024:
Late July: I attended the Linguistic Summer Institute of Taiwan, held at the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, Taiwan! It was my pleasure meeting and learning from folks working on Mandarin syntax/semantics.
15 July: I successfully defended my oral proposal for my dissertation: Topics in Mandarin referring expressions!