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My research focuses on the syntax of natural language and its interface with semantics and pragmatics. I work primarily on Magahi and Hindi, South Asian languages, exploring how their grammatical systems inform broader questions in linguistic theory. The topics I work on include honorification in verbal and nominal domains, split constructions, bare nominals, classifiers, number morphology, and discourse particles.

I am also interested in applying formal linguistics knowledge to natural language processing.

I received my PhD in 2020 from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA. I joined IIT Delhi in 2023 as an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences.

My current projects:

  • Honorification in Hindi and the discourse particle ji
  • The syntax of honorific mismatches in Magahi and beyond
  • Bare nominals, classifiers and number morphology in Magahi and beyond
  • Negation in natural language

In Progress

  • Jointly with Hariprasad Doley. "Argument Structure in Mising: A Decompositional Analysis of Voice, Cause, and Applicatives." Proceedings in FASAL-16
  • Jointly with Siddharth Misra. Negation in Magahi. Chapter for a volume on negation in Modern Indian languages.
  • Jointly with Ojaswee Bhalla. Re-visiting Honorification in Hindi and the Discourse Particle ji.
  • The Syntax of Honorific Mismatches in Magahi.
  • Pronominal System in Magahi. Chapter for a volume on The Pronominal Systems of the South Asian Languages.

Recent

Invited Talks
  • Discussant, Seminar on South Asian Syntax: In memory of Prof. Probal Dasgupta (1953–2026). Online, August 1, 2026.
  • "Allocutivity and the Syntax of Honorifics: Lessons for Syntax-Discourse Relations." Joint Seminar, GKNU Institute of Humanities and SMOG Syntax Circle, Korea, January 2026.
  • "Allocutivity and the Syntax of Honorifics." Linguistics Colloquium, IIT Delhi, March 25, 2025.
  • "Morpho-Syntax of Agreement." Online, Amity Institute of English Studies and Research (AIESR), AUUP, Noida, March 24, 2025.
  • "The clause linker ki and the Negator in Hindi: Insight from Big Ellipsis." Workshop at ICON-2024, AU-KBC Chennai, December 19, 2024.
  • "Negation in Magahi." Round Table, Linguistic Traditions and Structure of Negation in Modern Indian Languages, IIT Madras, September 30 – October 1, 2024.
Conference Talks
  • Jointly with Hariprasad Doley. "Argument Structure in Mising: A Decompositional Analysis of Voice, Cause, and Applicatives." FASAL-16, University of South Carolina, USA. 2026.
  • Jointly with Ojaswee Bhalla. "The Hindi Discourse particle ji:, Honorificity and the Form-Meaning Interaction." SICOGG-27, Sogang University, Seoul. 2025
  • Jointly with Ojaswee Bhalla. "Re-visiting honorification in Hindi and the discourse particle ji." FASAL-15, UT Austin. 2025.
  • "The Syntax and Semantics of Honorific Mismatches in Magahi." SALA-38, Nagaland University, Kohima. 2024.
Recent Publications
  • 2026 Jointly with Ojaswee Bhalla. "Allocutivity and the Syntax of Honorifics." Annual Review of Linguistics, Vol. 12. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-linguistics-041124-105611
  • 2026 Jointly with Ojaswee Bhalla. "The Hindi Discourse particle ji:, Honorificity and the Form-Meaning Interaction." Proceedings of SICOGG-27, pp. 21–30.
  • 2025 Jointly with Ojaswee Bhalla. "Re-visiting honorification in Hindi and the discourse particle ji." Proceedings of FASAL-15, UT Austin.
  • 2024 Jointly with Mukherjee et al. "Multilingual text style transfer: Datasets & models for Indian languages." arXiv:2405.20805.

CV

Last updated: September 2026  ·  Download CV (PDF)

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Publications

In Progress

  • Jointly with Siddharth Misra. Negation in Magahi. Chapter for a volume on negation in Modern Indian languages.
  • Pronominal System in Magahi. Chapter for a volume on The Pronominal Systems of the South Asian Languages.

Journal Articles & Book Chapters

2026

2022

  • Jointly with Bill Haddican. The formal heterogeneity of allocutivity. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7(1). pp. 1–41. DOI: 10.16995/glossa.7670
  • Jointly with Mark Baker. Person and honorification: Features and interactions in Magahi. Glossa 7(1). pp. 1–35. DOI: 10.16995/glossa.7675

2021

  • Morphosyntax of Magahi Addressee Agreement. Syntax 24(3). pp. 263–296. DOI: 10.1111/synt.12213
  • Jointly with Troy Messick. Stripping in Hindi: Does clause size matter? In Laszakovits & Shen (eds.), The size of things I: Structure building, pp. 247–263. Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5524296

2020

  • Asymmetry in splitting of subject and object in Hindi and Magahi. Indian Linguistics 81(3–4). pp. 53–75.

2019

  • Jointly with Atul Kr. Ojha and Sriniket Kumar Mishra. A corpus-based study of semantics of bare nominals in Magahi and Bhojpuri: The case of article-less languages. Linguistic Ecology of Bihar. Europa Publisher.

2017

  • Jointly with Veneeta Dayal. Scope Marking at the Syntax-Semantics Interface. Oxford Research Encyclopedia.

2014

  • The morpho-syntax of Nominal Particle -wa. Indian Linguistics 75(3–4), pp. 39–44. ISSN: 0378-0759.
  • Magahi Nominal Particle -wa. Indian Linguistics 75(1–2), pp. 69–74. ISSN: 0378-0759.

Unpublished Manuscript

  • 2018. Jointly with Mark Baker. On the Mechanics (Syntax) of Indexical Shift: Evidence from Allocutive Agreement in Magahi. Ms., Rutgers University.

Proceedings

  • 2025. Jointly with Ojaswee Bhalla. The Hindi Discourse particle ji:, Honorificity and the Form-Meaning Interaction. In Proceedings of SICOGG-27, pp. 21–30. Korea Generative Grammar Circle, South Korea.
  • 2025. Jointly with Ojaswee Bhalla. Re-visiting honorification in Hindi and the discourse particle ji. In Proceedings of FASAL-15, UT Austin.
  • 2024. Jointly with Sourabrata Mukherjee, Atul Kr. Ojha, Akanksha Bansal, John P. McCrae, Ondřej Dušek. Multilingual text style transfer: Datasets & models for Indian languages. arXiv:2405.20805.
  • 2022. Jointly with Pritha Majumdar, Akanksha Bansal, Atul Kr. Ojha, John Philip McCrae. Bengali and Magahi PUD treebank and Parser. Proceedings of WILDRE-6, LREC 2022, Marseille.
  • 2021. The Syntax of Magahi Addressee Agreement. In Alok & Raghotham (eds.), Proceedings of FASAL-9, pp. 1–13.
  • 2021. Jointly with Mohit Raj, Shyam Ratan, Ritesh Kumar & Atul Kr. Ojha. Developing Universal Dependencies Treebanks for Magahi and Braj. Proceedings of PAIL-2021, pp. 10–14.
  • 2020. Jointly with Akanksha Bansal, Atul Kr. Ojha, Bornini Lahiri, Ritesh Kumar. KMI-Panlingua-IITKGP @SIGTYP2020: Exploring Rules and Hybrid Systems for Automatic Prediction of Typological Features. Proceedings of SIGTYP 2020, EMNLP.
  • 2018. Jointly with Ritesh Kumar, Bornini Lahiri, Atul Kr. Ojha, Mayank Jain, Abdul Basit, Yogesh Dawar. Automatic Identification of Closely-related Indian Languages: Resources and Experiments. Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Indian Language Data: Resources and Evaluation, LREC2018.
  • 2016. The syntax of split: The case of Hindi and Magahi. In Menon & Syed (eds.), Proceedings of FASAL-6, pp. 53–61.
  • 2013. Jointly with Bornini Lahiri and Ritesh Kumar. Bihari Hindi as a Mixed Language. Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Contact in India, Deccan College, pp. 199–208.
  • 2012. Jointly with Bornini Lahiri and Ritesh Kumar. Developing a POS tagger for Magahi: A Comparative Study. Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Asian Language Resources, COLING, Mumbai.
  • 2011. Jointly with Bornini Lahiri and Ritesh Kumar. Challenges in Developing LRs for Non-Scheduled Languages: A Case of Magahi. Proceedings of the 5th Language Technology Conference, Poznan, Poland, pp. 60–64.

Presentations

Invited Talks

  • 2026. Discussant, Seminar on South Asian Syntax: In memory of Prof. Probal Dasgupta (1953–2026). Online, August 1, 2026.
  • 2026. Allocutivity and the Syntax of Honorifics: Lessons for Syntax-Discourse Relations. Joint Seminar, GKNU Institute of Humanities and SMOG Syntax Circle, Korea, January 2026.
  • 2025. Allocutivity and the Syntax of Honorifics. Linguistics Colloquium, IIT Delhi, March 25, 2025.
  • 2025. Morpho-Syntax of Agreement. Online, Amity Institute of English Studies and Research, AUUP, Noida. March 24, 2025.
  • 2024. The clause linker ki and the Negator in Hindi: Insight from Big Ellipsis. Workshop at ICON-2024, AU-KBC Chennai, December 19, 2024.
  • 2024. Negation in Magahi. Round Table, Linguistic Traditions and Structure of Negation in Modern Indian Languages, IIT Madras, September 30 – October 1, 2024.
  • 2024. Formalization of Agreement in Natural Language. Online, Dept. of Linguistics, Manipur University, June 10, 2024.
  • 2022. Speaker and Addressee in Natural Language: Honorificity and Indexicality in Magahi. YJHD Lecture Series, JNU, June 2022.
  • 2022. The discourse particle -waa in the Magahi nominal domain. Language Diversity, Linguistic Theory and Cultural Identity in South Asia, New Haven, CT, April 2022.
  • 2019. Indexical Shift and Addressee Agreement: The Case of Magahi. NYU Syntax BB Talk, April 5, 2019.

Refereed Conference Presentations

  • 2026. Jointly with Hariprasad Doley. Argument Structure in Mising: A Decompositional Analysis of Voice, Cause, and Applicatives. FASAL-16, University of South Carolina, USA.
  • 2025. Jointly with Ojaswee Bhalla. Re-visiting honorification in Hindi and the discourse particle ji. FASAL-15, UT Austin.
  • 2024. The Syntax and Semantics of Honorific Mismatches in Magahi. SALA-38, Nagaland University, Kohima, November 28–30.
  • 2022. Jointly with Pritha Majumdar, Akanksha Bansal, Atul Kr. Ojha & John P. McCrae. Bengali and Magahi PUD Treebank and Parser. WILDRE-6 at LREC2022, Marseille.
  • 2021. Jointly with Mohit Raj, Shyam Ratan, Ritesh Kumar & Atul Kr. Ojha. Developing Universal Dependencies Treebanks for Magahi and Braj. PAIL-2021, December 16–19. Online.
  • 2021. Grammar of Honorification. Poster, WCCFL-39, University of Arizona, April 8–11. Online.
  • 2021. Jointly with Bill Haddican. On some parameters of allocutive marking. CamCoS-9, February.
  • 2021. Jointly with Mark Baker. Person and Honorification: Features and Interactions in Magahi. LSA Annual Meeting, January 7–10. Online.
  • 2021. Jointly with Bill Haddican. Cross-linguistic differences in embedded/root asymmetries in allocutive marking. LSA Annual Meeting, January 7–10. Online.
  • 2019. 2nd person pronoun bound by Hr: Evidence from Magahi Addressee Agreement. Poster, Workshop on Person and Perspective, Los Angeles, May 3–4.
  • 2019. Morphosyntax of Magahi Addressee Agreement. FASAL-9, Portland, Oregon, March 16–17.
  • 2019. Jointly with Mark Baker. On the Syntax of Addressee Agreement and Indexical Shift in Magahi. LSA Annual Meeting, New York, January 3–6.
  • 2016. Jointly with Ritesh Kumar, Atul Kr. Ojha, Bornini Lahiri. Developing Resources and Tools for some Lesser-known Languages of India. Regional ICON 2016, IIT-BHU, Varanasi, December 16.
  • 2016. The syntax of split: The case of Hindi and Magahi. FASAL-6, UMass Amherst, March 12–13.
  • 2014. On two forms of Magahi nouns. FASAL-4, Rutgers University, March 29–30.
  • 2013. Jointly with Mustafa Al-humari. Agreement and Feature Inheritance. Poster, Faculty of Language Design Interfaces, IIT Delhi, February 11–12.
  • 2013. The morpho-syntax of Nominal Particle -wa. SCONLI-7, Aligarh Muslim University, February 8–10.
  • 2012. Jointly with Sriniket Kumar Mishra. What do Indian Languages have: DP or NP? 18th Himalayan Languages Symposium, BHU, Varanasi, September 10–12.
  • 2012. Magahi Spatial Postposition. SCONLI-6, BHU, Varanasi, February 17–19.
  • 2011. Case in Magahi. Poster, Essex, England.
  • 2011. Causative Construction in Magahi. SCONLI-3, JNU Delhi, February 19–20.
  • 2008. Honorificity in Magahi. SCONLI-2, Delhi University, February 9–10.
  • 2006. Jointly with Anil Thakur and Ravi Prakash. Some Socio-Psycho-Linguistic Aspects of Abusive Words in Hindi-Bhojpuri. 28th All India Conference of Linguists, BHU, November 2–4.

Project Supervision

As Post Doctoral Supervisor

  • Ojaswee Bhalla. 2024–2026. Honorification and particle ji in Hindi.

As Doctoral Dissertation Supervisor

  • MD Abul Afzal Mubashshir. 2026. Syntax and Semantics of Noun Phrases (proposed title). Ongoing.
  • Vansh. 2026. Information Structure in Hindi-Urdu (proposed title). Ongoing.
  • Sharon Valui. 2025. The Morpho-Syntax of Tangkhul (proposed title). Ongoing.
  • Ishita Agrawal. 2024. Hindi Multi-Word Expressions: Benchmark Revision, LLM Evaluation, and Multimodal Disambiguation (proposed title). Ongoing.
  • Joynal Ali. 2024. Honorification in the Grammar: The Syntax of Discourse Participants and Honorificity in Karbi Hills (proposed title). Ongoing.
  • Siddharth Misra. 2024. Split Constructions in Natural Language (proposed title). Ongoing.
  • Sudipta Saha. 2024. The Architecture of Silence: Deriving Stripping, Verb-stranding Ellipsis and Sluicing in Bangla (proposed title). Ongoing.

As Doctoral Dissertation Internal Expert

  • Sagar Boro
  • Alokesh Majumder
  • Gyandeep Chetia
  • Pallab Basu
  • Lugai Daphne Kamei

Doctoral Dissertation External Expert

  • Sonal Sinha. 2023. Conjunct Agreement Hierarchy in Eastern Indo-Aryan Languages. Ongoing.

MSc. Cognitive Science Project Supervision

  • Mojum Kamduk. 2026. Does Verb Agglutination Shape How We Segment Events? A Cross-Linguistic Study of Hindi and Galo.
  • Chinmayee Mohapatra. 2026. Understanding Event Boundary in Hinglish.

Events

  • Upcoming Himalayan Languages Symposium, IIT Delhi, 30 October – 1 November 2026 (co-organizer).
  • Linguistic Summer School in the Indian Mountains, IIT Delhi Sonipat Campus, 1–7 June 2026 (co-organizer).
  • Discourse Particles in South Asian Languages, IIT Delhi, New Delhi, 22–23 December 2025 (convener).
  • Workshop on "The Left Periphery of Interrogatives", IIT Delhi New Delhi, 12 July 2024 (co-organizer).
Deepak Alok  ·  Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, IIT Delhi  ·  alokdeepak@iitd.ac.in