About Nadia

I am a doctoral candidate in linguistics at the University of Toronto specializing in language documentation, minimalist syntax, historical linguistics, and lexical semantics.  My thesis presents collaborative work with communities of Nahuatl speakers from the state of San Luis Potosí in Central Mexico in the cultural region of la Huasteca. This dissertation looks at the adpositional inventory of Huastca Nahuatl. My dissertation discusses historical changes in expressions of spatiotemporal relations, situating the flexible morphology of Huasteca Nahuatl within a cross-linguistic typology of spatial expressions including case markers, adpositions, and relational nouns. ​

 

Supplementing this study is my background in Romance linguistics, including my MA in Theoretical linguistics at the University of Toronto that focussed on epistemic modality in French conditionals. In addition, my Bilingual BA in Linguistics and Language Studies at the Glendon College of York University allowed me to concentrate on Romance and Southwestern European linguistics, including Romance linguistics and Euskera.

 

​In tandem with my dissertation, I am working on several collaborative projects with other linguists. These include work on documenting and creating pedagogical grammars of Mayan languages in Mexico and Central America: Tének and Itza' (links to come!). Yet another is a computational/corpus study on the evolution of datives in the Western Romance nominal domain. ​