Hello! I’m Molly and I’m a second-year PhD student in linguistics at New York University. My research is primarily in sociolinguistics, with additional interests in syntax-semantics and in psycholinguistics and language acquisition. My advisor is Laurel MacKenzie. You can read more about my research interests below.

Prior to starting at NYU, I received an A.B. in Linguistics from Princeton University, with a certificate (minor) in Cognitive Science. At Princeton, my senior thesis was advised by Alex Göbel and my junior paper (independent research) was advised by Catalina Méndez Vallejo, and I was a research assistant with Casey Lew-Williams and Martin Zettersten in the Princeton Baby Lab.

Outside of linguistics, I’m a classical clarinetist and a knitter, and a very amateur runner and rock climber. I also love trivia competitions, watching baseball, and my hometown of Philadelphia.

Research Interests

As a sociolinguistic researcher, I’m interested in language variation — both between and within dialects/communities. In particular, I’m curious about how social identity and linguistic form (especially syntax) are intertwined. My undergraduate senior thesis examined a specific linguistic form (English simple present tense-aspect morphology on eventive verbs) as part of the social landscape of tabletop role-playing game-oriented communities; I built and used a corpus to investigate whether these forms can be semantically analyzed as performatives. My undergraduate junior paper was a micro-variationist study of the Philadelphia English syntactic form seen in constructions like “I’m done my homework” (as distinct from “I’m done with my homework”); I examined its distribution within Philadelphia English speakers and the syntactic and semantic constraints on its acceptability. I’m also interested in discourse and socio-pragmatics; the interfaces between cognition, acquisition, and variation; and language and gender.

On the psycholinguistics/acquisition front, I’m interested in cognitive processing of linguistic ambiguity and semantic learning/generalization. In my research with the Princeton Baby Lab, I investigated how active information seeking strategies might facilitate language learners’ acquisition of new words at ambiguous levels of specificity (for example, when it is unclear whether a new word “really means” something very specific like “dalmatian”, or something broader like “dog” or “animal” or “living thing”).

Other interests include binding theory/pronouns and anaphors, presupposition, indexicality, and more. Languages I’ve worked with include English (various dialects/communities), Korean, Hwanyle/Kulaale, and Shona; I’m also interested in Yiddish and in French and other Romance languages.

I am passionate about and have been involved with endangered language documentation and revitalization, as well as science communication and outreach. I value research that supports community involvement and language rights/justice in general.

You can reach me at mic6457 at nyu dot edu.