Hi! I’m a fourth-year PhD student in the Linguistics department at New York University, working with Lucas Champollion. Before this, I was at the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad.

My primary interests are in formal semantics and pragmatics, and within that, tense, aspect, and modality. I’m particularly interested in interactions between temporal and modal meaning, and how these 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. My ongoing dissertation project is about identifying correspondences between indicative and counterfactual conditionals, by examining conditional connectives that are more restricted than English if. Other questions I’ve worked on include the meaning of the Indian English only.

I have a strong side-interest in (socio)phonetics. Over the last few years, I have done experimental and corpus-based work on variation and accommodation in multilingual speech. I enjoy thinking about the complex ways we use language in real communicative contexts, and the physiological processes that allow us to do this in real time. In particular, I’ve been interested in understanding cross-language influence in speech (L2 ‘accents’) as a communicatively useful behavior. (Incidentally, here is a great paper about the (mis)use of the term ‘native speaker’ in linguistic research.) I enjoy working with different types of data and methodologies, and having conversations across (sub)disciplinary boundaries.

I care about open science practices and making linguistic research accessible. This page has lay summaries of completed and ongoing projects, along with links to data and code. These are some resources I have created, including a word-finding tool to generate Bangla stimuli 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.