Research
I am interested in the following theoretical areas:
Discourse Processing: I am very much interested in linguistic units that are larger than sentences, and I am especially interested in the mechanisms that speakers employ in order to establish coherence and make two sentences make sense with respect to each other. Currently, I am looking at how narrators plan discourse with respect to narrative structure, and the semantic factors that affect this process. I am also investigating the effects of narrative structure in temporal interpretation and processing, with the hypothesis that readers generate temporal expectations in discourse including expectation about upcoming events and their temporal location. I am investigating how these temporal expectations interact with text comprehension processes.
Formal Semantics of Time and Temporal Processing: I am extremely fascinated by the notion of time, and how different languages encode it, by using grammatical mechanisms such as tense and aspect. I am also interested at the temporal properties that are exhibited by tenseless languages. I am also interested in the different means that tenseless languages employ to encode temporal information. And more recently, in my dissertation, I have been doing research on temporal processing, looking at how readers generate expectations of the temporal properties of the discourse they are processing, showing that they are sensitive to violations of these expectations.
Psycholinguistics: I am very interested in the psychological reality of language, as well as the psychological mechanisms that are involved in processing language, and in particular, discourse. I have several projects involving various people in the department investigating several phenomena in language, ranging from the processing of relative clauses to the number agreement phenomena in conjoined noun phrases.
Experimental Linguistics: I am very interested in using experimental methods in linguistic research. I have previously worked on experimental temporal semantics, where I designed offline linguistic tests in order to determine the exact functions of a number of aspectual markings in Tagalog, which happens to be a tenseless language. Currently, I am collaborating on a project on historical laboratory phonology, where we investigate probable causes of vowel-fronting in the environment of rhotacized consonants.
Functional syntax: I am most comfortable working within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar. I am interested in cross-linguistic variations of the interfaces between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. In the past, I have investigated how word order variation in Tagalog can be explained through the interaction of information structure with syntactic structure. In more recent collaborative work, I have proposed models on how to account for contextual information in RRG, showing how context contributes to syntactic variability in various languages.
Austronesian Linguistics: In the past, I have done syntactic research mainly revolving around Philippine languages. Aside from my native Tagalog, I have done research in Cuyunon, another Philippine language found in central Philippines.
In addition to that, I am also a member of the Psycholinguistics Laboratory, which is housed by the Department of Psychology. Some of my duties involve participant recruitment and management, data collection, and other lab-related routine activities.
I also served as a research assistant for the Experimental Syntax Project, under the direction of Rui P. Chaves. My role in this project involved designing and implementing syntax experiments that were made to test certain grammaticality judgments that manipulated various complex constructions in English. I also was responsible for participant recruitment and data collection, in addition to implementation of inferential statistics and their interpretation.