I'm a final-year linguistics PhD student at the University of Cambridge (Fitzwilliam College). I work on minimalist syntax and morphology. My PhD project is on the properties of Voice heads in Urdu. My supervisors are Theresa Biberauer and Ian Roberts and my advisor is Adam Ledgeway.
I am funded by the Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholarship.
Download my CV here.
upcoming
Phases in the Verbal Domain
Invited speaker for Newcastle University workshop on Phases in the Verbal Domain, 26-27 June 2023 (call for papers). Title TBD.
research interests
My primary research areas are case systems and Urdu syntax. Other research interests include decomposition of the verbal domain, word order, and South Asian linguistics.
My PhD project examines the relationship between Voice, case and external arguments in Urdu. I am probing the properties of active and non-active Voice heads in a range of phenomena, such as actives, passives and anticausatives. One important finding that I present in my thesis is that so-called accusative-preserving passives have underlyingly active syntax, similar to active impersonal constructions proposed for Polish and Icelandic. This shows that accusative case is reserved to active contexts in Urdu. My thesis (currently in the writing stage) also offers novel perspectives on differential object marking, dative intervention and subjecthood.
education
I completed my masters (2018-19), also at the University of Cambridge. My MPhil thesis was supervised by Theresa Biberauer and focused on accusative case in Hindi-Urdu. It was the first attempt at developing a composite case-checking approach for nominative, ergative and accusative cases in Urdu. You can download my MPhil thesis here.
I was at University College London (UCL) for my undergraduate degree (2015-18). My BA thesis was titled Case-(Mis)Matching in Urdu Sluicing and was supervised by Klaus Abels. I introduced novel data from Urdu sluicing and showed that there must be syntactic structure in the ellipsis-site and that it stands in a semantic identity relation to its antecedent. The thesis won the Outstanding Undergraduate Dissertation in Linguistics prize from the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB). The dissertation was later developed into a working paper and published in The Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics (COPiL). You can find it here.
languages
I am a native speaker of Urdu and (Pakistani) English. I am learning German.
non-academic interests
I like cooking, baking and feeding people. I also like psychological thrillers, rom-coms and reality tv.
I was vice-president of the graduate student committee in my college from 2020-21. Before this, I was social secretary in 2019-20. I have a lot of experience in leadership, organising and running events, and working with teams.