Biography:

My specialization is in linguistics, within which my interest lies in the area of syntax and semantics of natural languages. I work within theoretical framework of generative linguistics. My initial work was on the clause structure of Malayalam. I looked at the hierarchical structure of functional categories within the DP and tense, aspect, modality, and negation. Another related issue that I am interested in is (in)definiteness and genericity. Recently I have been looking the Functional sequence in terms of the universal hierarchy proposed by Cinque. Apart from syntax- semantics, my other areas of interest are philosophy of language, phonetics, English grammar, and varieties of English in India. Outside linguistics I keep an active interest in issues related to gender and identity, where my engagement has hardly gone beyond teaching some texts and interactions with more knowledgeable colleagues and friends.

Areas of interest/research: Theoretical Linguistics; Syntax and Semantics; Language Ideology, Language Policy and Language Politics; Marginalized Languages, Linguistic Identity, and Social Justice

Courses taught: Introduction to the study of language, Meaning in Language

Honours, awards, appointments:

a)      The “Best Young Linguist” award for the best paper presented by a research scholar at the All India Dravidian Linguistics Conferen­ce conducted by the Dravidian Linguistics Association, Thiruvanan­thapuram in 1995.

b)      Fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) as part of the Graduiertenkolleg “Universalität und Diversität: Sprachliche strukturen und Prozesse” at the University of Leipzig and Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena from December 1997 to November 2000.

c)      Research Assistant at the University of Kontanz, December 2000 to November 2001.

d)      Lecturer (2002 – 2007), Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad.

Representative publications:

(1)  Argument structure and aspect: The case of two imperfectives in Malayalam. Jointly with P Madhavan in Eric Reuland, Tanmoy Bhattacharya and Giorgos Spathas eds.  Argument structure, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007.

(2)  Linguistic theory and South Asian languages. (Jointly edited with Josef Bayer and Tanmoy Bhattacharya). John Benjamins, 2007.

(3)  Genericity, Quantification, and Modality: The many faces of –um and –unnu in Malayalam. CIEFL Occasional Papers in Linguistics 12: 2006.

(4)  Two copulas in Malayalam revisited. In the Proceedings of the First National Symposium on Modeling and Shallow Parsing of Indian Language (MSPIL) held at IIT Bombay, March 2006.