Description of research and teaching

I am an Academy of Finland Research Fellow in general linguistics at the Department of Languages, University of Helsinki. My work deals with grammatical number (e.g. singular vs. plural) which is a field that encompasses many subfields of linguistics, including morphology, syntax and semantics. In my MPhil and doctoral theses I focused on Welsh (Celtic, Indo-European), with comparative work with the other Celtic languages. Already in this work I was interested in the typological context of Welsh and the Celtic languages: how their grammatical number systems compare with those of other languages of the world and what the Celtic languages can add to our existing knowledge of them. My previous postdoctoral project had a primarily typological focus: it studied singulatives (derived noun forms meaning 'one' or 'unit') cross-linguistically, building the first ever database of this phenomenon (to appear in 2023).

My current Academy of Finland project aims at creating a new methodology for studying complex number patterns in a systematic way. For example, why do we sometimes find two or more forms of the same noun that seemingly have the same number value (e.g. singular, plural)? What exactly are the semantic splits that are relevant to number, such as animals that occur more commonly as individuals vs. those that tend to occur in herds or groups? We often know the morphology (how many number forms there are and how they are formed) but not the semantics and pragmatics of number: how does the semantic category (e.g. herd animal, edible grain...) of the noun interact with number marking? When there are seemingly optional forms, when and how is form A used, as opposed to form B? Is there variation in the use of A and B, and why? The project aims to contribute to one of the central questions in linguistics: what is the relationship between language and how we perceive the world and interact with it?

I teach Historical Linguistics, Evolution of Language and Speech and Celtic Linguistics, as well as some lectures on the medieval literature(s) of the British Isles.

I am the PI in linguistics in this exciting interdisciplinary project on comparing evolutionary processes in nature and society.

I am also an organiser of the annual Welsh Linguistics Seminar. In 2018-2022 I was an editor-in-chief of the open-access journal Studia Celtica Fennica.