Hi! I’m a third-year Ph.D. student in the Linguistics department at New York University (NYU) working with Lisa Davidson and Lucas Champollion. Prior to this, 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 adaptive behavior, rather than a problem that needs to be ‘fixed’.

My other major research interest concerns how languages express meanings related to time and modality (possibilities, necessity, etc). I’m especially interested in how these interact, and how that affects their linguistic expressions in the grammar. I have been working with data from the tense-aspect system and conditional constructions in Indo-Aryan languages, especially Bangla. 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 more conversations across (sub)disciplinary boundaries. More on my research here.

I believe that open science practices are important, and that findings of 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 ‘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.