(Se)Mantis Lab

Dr. Pilar Chamorro, Director

Pilar Chamorro's research focuses on the semantic and pragmatic contribution of temporal, aspectual, and modal expressions across languages. She is also interested in the semantics of plurals, the mass/count distinction, and quantification. She is also involved in the documentation and preservation of endangered languages of Brazil.

Dr. Dustin Chacón

The core question of his research is: How does the brain – an organ that is virtually the same across the species – manage to learn, use, and understand languages – which can be very different? His research is guided by insights from theoretical syntax/semantics, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience.

Dr. Dustin Chacón is the director of the FALCoN Lab.

Seaira Lett, PhD student, Coordinator

Seaira Lett has a B.A. in Spanish and linguistics from Emory University and a Master of Education from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Seaira’s research interests include language documentation and indigenous languages of Latin America. Her focus is on the morphosyntax of Chuj, a Mayan language spoken primarily in Guatemala. She currently collects data with a community of speakers in the US. 

Dr. Ningxian Li

His areas of interest include left periphery structure in Chinese and Spanish, the syntax and pragmatics of predicate fronting, precedural meaning, and argument structure in Chinese. His dissertation focused on predicate fronting in Spanish and Chinese. He served as a Chinese instructor for the STARTALK program (National Security Agency and National Foreign Language Center).

Jean Costa-Silva, PhD Candidate

Jean's primary linguistic interests pertain to Second Language Acquisition, Syntax, Semantics, and Cognitive Linguistics. His work focuses on the acquisition of motion descriptions by L2 English and L2 Portuguese speakers. He is interested in how learners employ different linguistic strategies to describe movement through space.

Jean is the coordinator of the SLAC Research Group.

Britton Hare, undergraduate student

Britton Hare is a first-year linguistics, international affairs, and psychology major. His academic interests include the backward transfer of semantics in Second Language Acquisition, Austronesian historical linguistics, and political discourse analysis concerning nuclear policy and minority groups.