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Biography

I received a B.A. with First Class Honours in Linguistics from McGill University in 2007, and completed a Ph.D in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh in 2012. Having done various teaching at Edinburgh and Aberdeen during my time as a postgraduate and after, I became a Lecturer in Linguistics at Aberdeen in autumn 2013.

I do research in theoretical syntax; my looked at restrictions on the syntactic distribution of adverbs, and I won the in 2013 for a paper on this topic. I work as well on morphosyntactic variation, which speaks to the importance of using evidence from ‘Non-Standard’ linguistic varieties to enrich our understanding of syntactic structure. To this effect, I published a on constructions such as , used in Scotland and the American Midlands, in 2014. I am especially interested in the way acceptability judgments on such variants are collected, and I have worked with colleagues in Computing Science on optimising Internet-based acceptability questionnaires (see and for some discussion). Recently I have also begun to explore human perceptions of language produced by AI and other issues related to the use of Large Language Models.

My book is available from Edinburgh University Press.