Welcome to my homepage!
I am a postdoctoral researcher in the General Linguistics group at Bielefeld University, working with Prof. Dr. Jutta Hartmann. My research focuses on the syntax of information structure in natural language and its interface with morphology and semantics. I am particularly interested in phenomena such as focus and focus sensitivity, question formation, islandhood, resumption, and ellipsis in West African languages
By examining understudied languages (through original fieldwork), my research aims to motivate cross-linguistic generalizations as well as identify parameters that illuminate the human cognitive capacity of language.
Previously, I worked as a research assistant as part of the DFG-funded project on the “VP-periphery of the Mabia languages”, spoken in Ghana (PI: Prof. Dr. Katharina Hartmann). I received my PhD in linguistics from Goethe University Frankfurt in 2025, with the thesis titled: "Focus Sensitivity in Mabia and Yoruboid". I was supervised by Katharina Hartmann and Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine.
News & Upcomings
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I will be teaching (Topics in Syntax) at the forthcoming Africa Computational Linguistics (AfriCompLings) Summer School, July 13th - August 15th, 2026 (virtual)
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We (Maryam Mohammadi, Alon Fishman, and I) are organizing a workshop on "Information Structure under the Microscope: Zooming in on Cross-linguistic Data" as part of the 49th Annual Meeting of the German Society of Linguistics (DGfS49) at the University of Jena, Germany, 3rd–5th March 2027.
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See the workshop's website for more information and abstract submission guidelines.
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My doctoral dissertation on "Focus Sensitivity in Mabia and Yoruboid" is finally available!
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You can download it from LingBuzz.
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Publication alert!
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My ACAL54 proceeding paper on the "Focus and the association with focus sensitive particle yerane in Kasem" has been published in Language Science Press! [you can download it here].
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My paper on the "Focus marking in Ìkálẹ̀ and the Final-Over-Final Condition" has finally been published in Linguistic Variation! [you can download it here].
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My WCCFL42 proceeding paper on "Towards a Propositional Concord Approach for Exclusives in Kasem" is finally out! You can find the paper here.
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Upcoming Presentations
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26/08/2026: Multiple wh-questions in morphosyntactic focus marking languages: Kasem (Mabia/Gur) as a case study. 59th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 59), Universität Osnabrück.