Aidan Sharma

I’m a fifth year Linguistics PhD student at Rutgers University advised by Mark Baker and Dorothy Ahn. My theoretical interests are mostly in syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, but I have done some phonology work as well. My research focuses on definiteness and honorificity, and I am also interested in multi-functional quantifier particles and vowel reduction.

Language-wise, my work is mainly on (Eastern) Indo-Aryan and Turkic. In particular, I’m interested in Magahi and the other languages spoken in Bihar, and Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uyghur and the other Turkic languages spoken in Central Asia. I have also begun working on the Western Indo-Aryan language Banjara.

At Rutgers, I’m a member of the Meaning Across Languages Lab run by Dorothy Ahn and the Fieldwork Lab run by Maria Kouneli and Ryan Walter Smith.

Before Rutgers, I did my undergrad in math at UCLA, where I was also a member of the Russian Flagship Program. For the overseas portion of the program, I studied Russian for a summer then later a full academic year through Al-Farabi Kazakh National University.