I am an assistant professor at the UP Department of Linguistics where I have been teaching linguistics and Chinese Mandarin since 2009. I also conduct research on the morphosyntax of Philippine languages, the interface between form and meaning, as well as on the discourses around the use, acquisition and transmission of languages in the Philippine context. I am also interested in investigating how adults acquire a second/foreign language and the factors that influence their ability to do so.
Among the languages that I have worked on are Tagalog, Iraya Mangyan, and Buhid Mangyan. I have conducted fieldwork in Oriental Mindoro, Iloilo, and Davao del Norte where I collected linguistic data on Akeanon, Capizon, Kaagan, Mansaka, Tagakaulo, Hanunoo, Southern Sorsoganon, and Bangon.
At present, I am a PhD student at the University of Naples L'Orientale, where I am documenting the language attitudes and multilingual practices of first and second generation Filipinos living in Naples, Italy. My doctoral dissertation also aims to identify linguistic features that point to possible effects of language contact between Tagalog and Italian.
I have been part of several research projects over the years. I continue to supervise the cataloguing and digitization of legacy language materials collected by the late Dr. Ernesto Constantino. This collection includes numerous raw data from over 100 Philippine languages which were collected between the 1960s and the late 1990s. I also previously headed the local team that annotated a Tagalog corpus using the Universal Dependencies Framework as part of a project headed by Dr. Gerard Heyer (Leipzig University) and Dr. Nikolaus Himmelmann (University of Cologne). This Tagalog Universal Dependencies Treebank is composed of around 15,000 sentences with over 300,000 tokens crawled from the Internet. Other research projects that I have been involved in are listed in the projects section.
I also currently head the production of the UP Working Papers in Linguistics journal, which spotlights excellent research papers and essays written by our students and affiliates.
When I am not steeped in linguistic research, I dabble in graphic design and illustration. I created visual elicitation materials for a few experimental linguistic research projects. I am also behind the current design of our Department's website, some of the covers of academic journals like The Archive, Banwaan: The Philippine Journal of Folklore, and HanPil: Studies on Korea and the Philippines, as well as some of the publicity materials that have been used for various events and projects organized by the UPD Department of Linguistics, by the UP Korea Research Center, and by the UPD CSSP Folklore Studies Program. I also got published in a comic book anthology, which you will hopefully never find a copy of... ( = u = )