https://shaunak-phadnis.github.io/

1<!doctype html><html lang=en-us><head><meta name=generator content="Hugo 0.110.0"><meta charset=utf-8><meta name=viewport content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1"><title>Home | Shaunak Phadnis</title><link rel=stylesheet href=/css/style.css><link rel=stylesheet href=/css/fonts.css></head><body><nav><ul class=menu><li><a href=/>Home</a></li><li><a href=/output/>Output</a></li><li><a href=/teaching/>Teaching</a></li><li><a href=/about/>About</a></li></ul><hr></nav><h1 id=hello--im-shaunak->Hello — I’m Shaunak 👋</h1><img src=/images/profile.jpeg width=250 style="float:right;margin:0 0 1rem 1rem"><p>I am a 3rd year PhD student at the <a href=https://www.umass.edu/linguistics/>Department of Linguistics at UMass Amherst</a>. I have an MA in Linguistics from English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad and a BSc in Mathematics from Fergusson College, Pune. Before coming to UMass I briefly worked as a Conversational UX designer at an AI start-up in India.</p><p>Broadly, I am interested in understanding how conversations work - how speakers navigate and communicate implicit meaning through their responses in a discourse.
2More specifically, I am interested in:</p><ul><li>Representation of not-at-issue meaning and structure of the context and common ground.</li><li>How strategies of rejection, denial, and disagreement are encoded across langauges and what the building blocks for them are.</li><li>Off-record communication and signaling strategies (Insinuations, Dogwhistles, Two-tracked conversations)</li><li>Discourse particles in South Asian languages and discursive strategies they conventionalize.</li></ul><p>Thus, this grounds my research in Formal Pragmatics and its interface with Semantics on one hand and Social meaning/Philosophy of Language on the other. Apart from this, I also like thinking about Syntax, specifically:</p><ul><li>Adverbial agreement in Indo-Aryan.</li><li>Person agreement in Marathi.</li></ul><p>I have a latent fascination with representation of event structures in cognition.</p><p><strong>Email:</strong> sphadnis[at]umass[dot]edu</p><h2 id=news>News</h2><ul><li>04/08/2026: <a href=https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/jsal/index.php/fasal/article/view/359>New paper</a> out in FASAL 15 proceedings!</li><li>03/01/2026: I gave a talk at <a href=https://sites.google.com/sas.upenn.edu/plc50/home>PLC50@UPenn</a> titled &ldquo;Not on the same page: case of <em>bərə</em> in Marathi&rdquo;.</li><li>12/22/2025: I presented my paper about puzzling Marathi discourse particle <em>bərə</em> at <a href=https://sites.google.com/view/dipsal/home>DiPSAL</a>@IIT-Delhi.</li><li>11/22/2025: I presented my work on the English slang <em>lowkey</em> at SNEWS held at UMass.</li></ul><ul></ul><footer><link rel=stylesheet href=//cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/katex/dist/katex.min.css>

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