Thesis Title:
Towards syntactic reconstruction of Proto-Japonic
Supervisor(s):
Professor Bjarke Frellesvig
Biography:
I am a first-year DPhil student in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, with specific research focus on Japanese linguistics. Prior to my DPhil, I completed a BA in Linguistics at UCL and an MPhil in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge.
Educational Background:
2024 – present. DPhil Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford
2022 – 2023. MPhil Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge
2019 – 2022. BA Linguistics, University College London (UCL)
Research Interests
My research interests lie at the intersection of Japanese linguistics and syntactic theory. As a generative grammarian, I am mainly interested in probing how the Chomskyan assumptions of human’s innate language faculty, namely the Universal Grammar (UG), can account for various syntactic phenomena observed within individual language grammar, as well as cross-linguistic similarities and variations.
Much of my previous research has centred around the investigation of syntactic properties of contemporary Japanese, such as ellipsis and wh-questions, within the Minimalist framework. My current DPhil research aims to reveal further the true syntactic nature of the Japanese language, by bringing together traditional Japanese philological literature with the insights of modern generative linguistics.
