Itamar Kastner

A graduate student at New York University and formerly a research assistant at the lab. My main interest was sign language phonology, namely the way it takes form in emerging sign languages and its interplay with syntax, the structure of sentences. The way people combine sounds or signs to create meaning is a fundamental part of language, but this happens slightly differently in new sign languages. Our lab examines this using both theoretical and experimental methods.Nowadays I study the interplay of morphology and syntax, that is, the way we build up words and the way we build up sentences.

Being at NYU allows me to use advanced experimental tools which let us map the human brain, lobe by lobe. I continue to work on sign languages, focusing now on verbs in American Sign Language.Prior to joining the lab I had worked mostly in theoretical linguistics and natural language processing. I’m still interested in projects I had worked on previously, including morphosemantics of pronouns and agreement systems, the morphosyntax of codeswitching and various computational models. Find me at my academic homepage, https://files.nyu.edu/ik747/public, or through my linguistics blog, Dagesh Kal.