I’m a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University in Michael Wagner’s prosodylab. I recently completed my PhD at Cornell University.

My research concerns context-sensitive meaning in language, and in particular the role of prosody (e.g. intonation, stress, rhythm) in discourse.

My general approach to language is theoretical, although my research methods are informed by a philosophy of “methodological pluralism” which has emerged out of cross-disciplinary movements like Laboratory Phonology and Experimental Pragmatics.  My recent contribution to this trend is the use of speech data “harvested” from the web.

My dissertation, Meaning and Prosody: On the Web, in the Lab and from the Theorist's Armchair, uses web-harvested speech from the web to investigate focus-sensitive constructions in English.

My dissertation work has also developed into a larger project, Harvesting Speech Datasets for Linguistic Research on the Web, with Mats Rooth (Cornell) and Michael Wagner (McGill), which was awarded a Digging Into Data grant.  See the resources page for latest developments and links to tools.