Research

Hi, welcome to my website!

I am a doctoral student in the Linguistics department at the University of Toronto. My research interests are in the syntax and semantics of information structure. I study the grammatical strategies made available by natural languages to their speakers for organizing the information they wish to convey to their addressees while engaged in discourse.

I am particularly interested in how focus- the highlighted information in an utterance, and topic- what an utterance is about, are expressed in Kwa languages. I am also interested in the interpretive properties associated with these grammatical strategies and their syntactic structures. I love working with primary language data so I enjoy going on fieldwork trips, and interacting with native speakers as they use their languages in their native communities.

Before I began my doctoral studies at the UofT, I completed a two-year MPhil research at the university of Hong Kong where I completed an original thesis on very interesting phenomenon in Igbo known as verbal fronting with doubling.

Outside of my research, I love mentoring young moms of African descent who have grad school aspirations, being a PhD student-mom myself! To this effect, I have a YouTube channel where I create recipe videos, meal prep videos, and a couple of other types of videos that help answer some of the questions that student-moms have about navigating grad school life while managing familial responsibilities. I also mentor a few other young women on a one-on-one basis.

Other information can be found in my CV on the menu section above.