Ashwini Deo

About

Ashwini Deo is a professor in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Her academic expertise includes Indo-Aryan languages, historical linguistics, semantic change, semantics and pragmatics, and metered verse. Her work focuses on understanding language evolution and the intricacies of meaning within linguistic contexts, contributing to the broader field of linguistic research and the study of Indo-Aryan language development.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Developmental psychology
• History
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• On looking into words (and beyond)

  2017-05-18 · 101 citations

  article

  On Looking into Words is a wide-ranging volume spanning current research into word structure and morphology, with a focus on historical linguistics and linguistic theory. The papers are offered as a tribute to Stephen R. Anderson, the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics at Yale, who is retiring at the end of the 2016-2017 academic year. The contributors are friends, colleagues, and former students of Professor Anderson, all important contributors to linguistics in their own right. As is…

  Publisher

• From change to value difference in degree achievements ∗

  2016-09-24 · 40 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Degree achievements and directed motion verbs are standardly taken to describe events in which an individual undergoes change over time. The spatial uses of these verbs, giving rise to what are known as their extent readings, indicate that a temporal change based semantics is not general enough to capture their be-havior. In this paper, we introduce a further range of facts that argues for a fully general analysis of the meaning of degree achievements and directed motion verbs in terms…

  Publisher

• Copula Distinction and Constrained Variability of Copula Use in Iberian and Mexican Spanish

  ScholarlyCommons (University of Pennsylvania) · 2017-01-01 · 11 citations

  articleOpen access

  Spanish has two copulas, ser and estar, which are often translated as English ‘be’. Here, we study their differences by investigating their contrastive distributional patterns in combination with adjectival predicates. Specifically, we test the processing predictions of a presupposition-based analysis (Deo et al. 2016) that accounts for a wide range of distributional patterns of the copulas. This analysis has the advantage that it explains the variable copulas’ uses observed across Spanish varie…

  PublisherOA PDF

• Word-Meaning Variation in English <i>Have</i> -Sentences: The Impact of Cognitive vs. Social Factors on Individuals' Linguistic Context-Sensitivity

  Language · 2022 · 7 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  We investigate the role of two possible sets of factors, cognitive and social, in modulating an individual's linguistic context-sensitivity: the capacity of a neurocognitive system to identify information in a communicative context that satisfies the meaning requirements of a given expression in that context. We assess whether the degree of contextual facilitation of an otherwise dispreferred reading of an English have -sentence is correlated with domain-general cognitive factors—by using the AU…

  PublisherDOI

• Dialects in the Indo‐Aryan Landscape

  2017-12-04 · 7 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: The Emergence of New Indo-Aryan--Tense, Aspect and Modality

  NSF · $322k · 2016–2019

• CAREER: The Emergence of New Indo-Aryan--Tense, Aspect and Modality

  NSF · $409k · 2013–2016

Frequent coauthors

• María Mercedes Piñango

  13 shared

• Lai Y

  National Chengchi University

  5 shared

• Devyani Sharma

  5 shared

• Cheryl Lacadie

  Resonance Research (United States)

  4 shared

• Martín Fuchs

  3 shared

• Argyro Katsika

  3 shared

• Larry M. Hyman

  University of California, Berkeley

  2 shared

• Muye Zhang

  2 shared

Similar researchers at University of Texas at Austin

• Don Millerh-36
• Harvey M. Sussmanh-33
• David I. Beaverh-32