Hi there! I am Sahil Patel from India, primarily working on verbal semantics of Indo-Aryan languages under Dr. Prerna Nadathur. My primary area of research is the interaction between tense and aspectual systems of IA languages and how they bring about aspectual and modal distinctions in the predicate.

I am also interested in the prosody and the semantic contribution of different discourse particles within a predicate. I believe that discourse particles — other than their function of moving the discourse forward among many things — have a plethora of social meaning packed as well and this social meaning adds a new layer for the semantics to interpret.

Additionally, I am working on the mapping of prosodic structure on different clause types in IA languages giving rise to different meanings. I mostly work within the dynamic semantics and pragmatics framework and I believe that such a cross-linguistic study can help us operationalize meaning in both its narrow and wide context, which is an important goal. 

An ideal project for me would be to work on spoken dialogue systems for Indian languages. A challenge that I have faced in this country while engaging with dialogue systems is the system’s limitation when it comes to understanding Indian English accent. I would like to improve the system which would understand Indian English but also understand the prosodic nuances as a whole cross-linguistically. 

Apart from these, I am interested in slurs and offensive language in general. Present theories are yet to account for the semantics of offensive languages in a large number of languages. I wish to explore expletives in particular in South Asian languages and how they contribute to the meaning — both social and lexical — in information structure.