About Me

I'm a PhD candidate of linguistics at UC San Diego. My theoretical interests revolve around tone and its many uses in grammar, including its representation as well as its interaction with intonation and syntax. Since 2018, I have been studying the Toussian languages (Niger Congo, potentially Gur/Mabia) of southwest Burkina Faso, which have complex tonal systems with intricate syntax-prosody interactions. My dissertation is a grammar of Northern Toussian.

I also study musical surrogate languages, which are ways of encoding speech through musical instruments. Northern Toussian has a musical surrogate language played on a type of xylophone called a balafon, where the tones as well as aspects of the syllable structure are encoded. I describe this system in Struthers-Young (2022)

Outside of academia, my interests and hobbies are playing the piano, coding, and rock climbing. I'm always looking for new Sci-Fi series to read.