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I am a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. My primary research interest lies in syntax and historical linguistics, in particular:

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    (i)   How does the syntactic typology of Austronesian languages inform

            us about the theory of Universal Grammar?;

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    (ii)  How does the synchronic variation among genetically closely        

            related languages shed light on the pattern of language change?;​

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    (iii) How does Austronesian comparative linguistics contribute to our

            understanding of the peopling of Southeast Asia and the Pacific?

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To answer these questions, my research focuses on the morphosyntactic typology of Austronesian languages, in particular languages with the so-called "Austronesian-type alignment". Starting from 2024, a joint project with Mary Walworth and Miriam Meyerhoff will tackle (ii)-(iii) via a systematic comparison of western Austronesian with east Polynesian languages under a Marsden standard grant.

 

A secondary focus of my research is linguistic subgrouping. Since 2020, my team and I have been using multidisciplinary data to re-examine the patterns of the Austronesian diaspora under a Marsden Fast Start Grant. Some outputs of our project can be found here, here and here.​

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I am currently the Editor-in-Chief of Te Reo—the Journal of the New Zealand Linguistic Society. Info about the journal can be found here.