Hi there! My name is Starr Sandoval, and I’m a fourth year PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia. My primary research interests lie in semantics and fieldwork. My supervisor is Marcin Morzycki, and my committee includes Ryan Bochnak and Hotze Rullman.
Theoretically, I’m interested in the grammar of non-intersective modification. My dissertation develops a framework for classifying different flavors of non-intersective adjectives and works to formalize how certain non-intersective adjectives influence grammatical properties of nominals. Stemming from this line of research, I also work on adverbials, as-phrases, constituent question word inventories, intensification, and expressive language. You can read more about my research and the projects I’m involved in here.
My fieldwork involves the documentation and analysis of Ktunaxa, a language isolate spoken in interior British Columbia and parts of Idaho, Washington, and Montana. I am currently collaborating with Ktunaxa community member Violet Birdstone to document forms of expressive meaning. This research is funded by the UBC Public Scholars Initiative. Learn more about this project here. To learn more about Ktunaxa, you can check out First Voices or @ktunaxapride on Instagram.
Prior to UBC, I worked as a lab manager for the Language Development Lab at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where I helped develop and run eye-tracking and EEG experiments. Before then, I received my BA in Linguistics from New York University, where I worked as a research assistant for Sudha Arunachalam at the LEARN Lab and Ailís Cournane at the Child Language Lab.
If you have questions, comments, or similar interests, I’d love to hear from you!
starr.sandoval[at]ubc.ca