About Me

Hi! I'm Styx. I am currently studying Linguistics at the Unversity of Virginia. My primary interest is in linguistic (syntactic) theory, and how it applies to both historical linguistics and sign languages. My bachelor’s thesis involves the application of Construction Grammar to an analysis of the development of the to-infinitive in English, showing the importance of combining modern linguistic theory and diachronic analysis.

I am also interested in the linguistics of sign languages. Specifically, I find the discursive motivations behind sign language syntax interesting. I have investigated Inuit Sign Language, analyzing its topic marking construction. I have also analyzed the constructions used to mark topic across sign languages, exploring their possible origins and discursive meanings from a typological perspective.

Aside from linguistics, I spend my spare time reading and programming. I am currently working on a web app to allow the creation of a constructicon. This uses the framework of Radical Construction Grammar to model a speaker’s linguistic knowledge in the form of a network of constructions. The goal is to create a program which is useful in language description while making as few assumptions about the language being described as possible.