Hi! I’m a third-year PhD student in the Linguistics department at New York University working with Lisa Davidson and Lucas Champollion. Before coming to NYU, I graduated from the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad.

I enjoy thinking about the complex ways in which we use language in real communicative contexts, and what that can tell us about how lanuage as a ‘system’ exists in the mind. Most people around the world use multiple languages– this makes multilingual settings a particularly exciting place to look into this. Over the last few years, I have been working on variation and accommodation in multilingual speech. I’m interested in cross-language influence in speech as a complex and communicatively useful behavior, rather than a problem that needs to be ‘fixed’.

My other major interest concerns how languages express meanings related to time and modality (possibilities, necessity, etc). In particular, I’m interested in how these interact, and how those interactions are reflected in the grammar. I have been working on this with data from the tense-aspect-auxiliary system of Bangla and, more recently, conditional constructions across languages. Other questions I’ve worked on recently include the meaning of the Indian English only, and vowel harmony in Khalkha Mongolian. I enjoy working with different types of data and methodologies, and care about having conversations across (sub)disciplinary boundaries. More on my research here.

I believe that open science practices are important, and that linguistic research should be accessible to the communities whose data makes up the substance of our work. This page has non-specialist summaries of completed and ongoing projects, along with links to data and code. These are some resources I’ve created, including a word-finding tool to generate items for psycholinguistic experiments, and an acoustic model for Khalkha Mongolian.

Outside of linguistics, I love animals of all kinds, painting, and being outdoors. In many Bengali households, children are given two (sometimes more) phonetically unrelated names– an official bhalo naam ‘good name’, and a daknaam `the name by which one is called’ (translation from Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, one of my favorite books). Mine is Disha, and I prefer to go by that.