Hi there! My name is Starr Sandoval, and I’m a third year PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia. My primary research interests lie in semantics and fieldwork. My supervisor is Marcin Morzycki, and my committee includes Ryan Bochnak and Hotze Rullman.

Prior to UBC, I worked as a lab manager for the Language Development Lab at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where I helped develop and run eye-tracking and EEG experiments. Before then, I received my BA in Linguistics from New York University, where I worked as a research assistant for Sudha Arunachalam at the LEARN Lab and Ailís Cournane at the Child Language Lab.

If you have questions, comments, or similar interests, I’d love to hear from you!
starr.sandoval[at]ubc.ca

Theoretically, I’m interested in developing a semantics for subsective adjectives that accounts for their influence the interpretation of nominals. I additionally research intensification, as-phrases, hypothetical comparatives, nonlocal readings of adjectives, the grammar of zero, and question word used to ask for manners and reasons across languages.  You can read more about my research and the projects I’m involved in here.

My fieldwork involves the documentation and analysis of Ktunaxa, a language isolate spoken in interior British Columbia and parts of Idaho, Washington, and Montana. I am a member of the Ktunaxa lab, where we work to develop preservation and teaching resources. To learn more about Ktunaxa, you can check out First Voices or @ktunaxapride on Instagram.

Publications

2023. Starr Sandoval. Monotonicity enables degree modification in Ktunaxa: an investigation of the intensifier wiⱡiⱡ, Proceedings of the 12th Semantics of Under-represented Languages of the Americas, in prep.

2022. Starr Sandoval, Daniel Greeson, Marcin Morzycki. Instrument Names, Bare Singulars, and Event Kinds. Proceedings of the 58th Chicago Linguistics Society, in prep.

Presentations 

2022. Starr Sandoval. Monotonicity enables degree modification in Ktunaxa: an investigation of the intensifier wiⱡiⱡ. Presentation at the 12th Semantics of Under-represented Languages of the Americas, Ottawa, Ontario. Oct. 13-15.

2022. Starr Sandoval, Daniel Greeson, Marcin Morzycki. Instrument Names, Bare Singulars, and Event Kinds. Presentation at 58th Chicago Linguistics Society, Chicago, Illinois.  April 15-17.

2019. Starr Sandoval. The child acquisition of presuppositions: a corpus study. Presentation at Harvard Lab for Developmental Studies Internship Program. Cambridge, Massachusetts. August 16.