Welcome

Hello, and welcome to my site.

I’m Victor, a PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Maryland. I work on modality, the way we talk about possibilities and necessities, and more broadly on linguistic displacement: we can describe states of affairs other than the one we’re in. More precisely, I’m interested in cases where the syntactic behavior of modal expressions shifts systematically depending on their interpretation, and conversely: whether the structures modal (semi-)auxiliaries appear in constrain, or fix, their available interpretations.

This connects to a broader interest in the computational architecture of language and cognition: what representations are involved or manipulated in linguistic computation , whether, and how, they are organized in various levels, how they are acquired, or implemented at the neural level. I believe that empirical puzzles in theoretical linguistics, approached formally and experimentally, can constrain the hypotheses about cognitive representation, and perhaps give insights about the neurobasis of language.

Thanks for stopping by. More soon.