Ponrawee Prasertsom ponrawee.prasertsom@ed.ac.uk
I am a PhD student at the Centre for Language Evolution, University of Edinburgh. My research focuses on explanations for why grammatical concepts appear to be constrained and recur across languages. Supervised by Prof Jennifer Culbertson and Prof Kenny Smith, I explore this primarily with artificial language experiments, but I actively think of other ways to bring in a variety of methods that best address the questions. More broadly, my research interests are in syntactic and semantic universals.
Prior to my PhD, I did the MSc in Evolution of Language and Cognition at Edinburgh. Before that, I was at Department of Linguistics, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, where I earned my MA in linguistics. I was supervised by Prof Attapol T. Rutherford, who I work with on a few natural language processing projects. I am also involved in the annual Thailand Linguistics Olympiad.
I have side interests in Thai political history, philosophy of science, history and philosophy of linguistics, as well as (analytic) ethics. In my free time, I enjoy reading profiles of random linguists, learning new web technologies and reading Japanese manga.
PSA: I am committed to higher language data quality in linguistics and cognitive sciences. If you need acceptability judgments for my native language (Bangkok Thai) or need to consult about anything on Thai, please feel free to email me for potential scheduled calls.