Hi, welcome to my website.

I am a PhD candidate in Department of Linguistics at Stony Brook University, where I work on syntax and morphology. I joined the program in 2021 and am advised by Dr. Paco Ordóñez.

My main research is on complex alignment and agreement systems, with a focus on Behbahani, a Southwestern Iranian language spoken in Behbahan, Iran. In my dissertation, I investigate how argument structure, verbal stems, agreement, and alignment interact in Behbahani grammar. I am especially interested in what this language can tell us about split alignment, the syntax of Voice and related functional projections, stem alternations, and nominalization.

One of the central puzzles in my work is that Behbahani shows rich interactions between tense, transitivity, stem choice, and agreement, even though the language has no morphological case. This makes it a useful testing ground for asking how much of what looks “morphological” on the surface is actually driven by deeper syntactic structure.

My work on Behbahani has three connected parts. The first is formal syntactic analysis: I use Behbahani to ask broader theoretical questions about argument licensing, alignment, and the syntax-morphology interface. The second is documentation: Behbahani is an endangered and primarily oral language with no standardized writing system, and as a native speaker, I am invested in making the language more visible both within and beyond linguistics. The third is computational: I am currently developing Haskell-based finite-state models to formally capture Behbahani agreement patterns.

More broadly, I am interested in language rights, linguistic diversity, and the role of documentation and language technologies in supporting marginalized and understudied language communities. I am especially interested in how computational tools and AI can be developed more responsibly for languages that are often left out of mainstream linguistic research and technological development.

You can find more about my research, teaching, and CV through the links on this website.