My name is Victoria-Elliot, or Elliot for short, and I am a formal linguist. A semanticist at my core, but I gleefully dip into morphology and syntax when the opportunity arises. I enjoy taking a creative and multi-faceted approach to puzzles in theoretical semantics. This means I am interested in evidence from experiments, natural language data, fieldwork, and theoretical work, when asking questions about the nature of the universal semantic frameworks in human language.
I am currently a PhD researcher in Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. My project is funded by LISS DTP. This work seeks to better understand the limits and extent of how we are able to link sentences. I am focusing on British Sign Language, and in particular the ways in which you can link sentences using ‘non-manual markers’ such as movement of the head or face. You can find more information under the 'Research Projects' section of this website.
I am also interested in how numerals and nouns combine. This was the subject of my Master’s Thesis, which I am currently preparing for publication. For this I designed an Artificial Language Learning experiment.
I am passionate about making academia accessible, at all levels. This website is currently under construction. I am working to get BSL translations for this website as soon as I can.
My work...described in only the 1000 most common words
I study the meaning of words and what goes on in the mind when we speak. From person to person, how we speak and add words together is different. But behind these different ways, there are things that are the same across all people because of the shared human language part of the brain. But how can we study hidden forms and rules deep in the brain? I look for answers in many places. I study real languages from all around the world and how people learn languages that I have made up.