College: Fitzwilliam College
Email: sak83@cam.ac.uk
Supervisor: Dr Theresa Biberauer and Ian Roberts
Research Topic: The Role of Voice in Urdu Case
About
Sana is a final year PhD student from Pakistan. Sana did her undergraduate in Linguistics at University College London. Her BA thesis investigated structural and semantic conditions on Urdu sluicing, using case as a diagnostic. She then did an MPhil in Linguistics in Cambridge, 2018-19. Her MPhil thesis focused on accusative case assignment in Urdu, specifically developing a decompositional approach to case features. She started her PhD in 2019 with Theresa Biberauer and Ian Roberts as supervisors and Adam Ledgeway as advisor.
Research
Sana’s PhD project examines the relationship between Voice and case, specifically looking at the Urdu case system in depth. Sana is especially interested in examining interactions between cases, especially between unexpected pairs, such as accusative and instrumental case. Her thesis (currently in the writing stages) looks at a range of case phenomena in Urdu, from differential object marking and dative intervention to passives and split-ergativity. The thesis also tackles the age-old challenge of deriving Burzio’s Generalisation, an especially interesting facet considering Urdu is often given as a counterexample to the generalisation.
Sana is also interested in issues related to decomposition of the verbal domain (Voice, v), such as light verbs, verbal morphology, agreement and Voice typology.
Scholarships/Prizes
Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholarship
Teaching
- Li9 2020-21
- Associate lecturer at ARU for Revealing English Structure 2021-22 and 2022-23.
Conference papers
A Case for Bare Accusatives in Hindi-Urdu (FASAL-10); The Urdu Active Impersonal (IGG-26); The Urdu Active Impersonal (FASAL-11); What is a Subject? A Survey of Urdu Subjects (LELPGC-22)
Publications
Kidwai, S., (2022c). A Survey of Urdu Subjects and their Properties. In E. Banerjee, A. Cairncross, S. Kidwai, & C. Triantafyllidou (Eds.), The Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics, 14(2), 27-70.
Kidwai, S., (2022b). A Case for Bare Accusatives in Hindi-Urdu. In I. Guha, S. Kidwai, & M. Schwarz (Eds.), Proceedings of (Formal) Approaches to South Asian Linguistics 10.
Kidwai, S., (2022a). The Urdu Active Impersonal. In S. Alam, Y. Sinha, & S. Srinivas (Eds.), Proceedings of (Formal) Approaches to South Asian Languages 11.
Nguyen, L., Bryant, C. Kidwai, S., & Biberauer, T., (2021). Automatic language identification in code-switched Hindi-English social media text. Journal of Open Humanities Data, 7(7). DOI: 10.5334/johd.44
Kidwai, S., (2020). Case-Mismatching in Urdu Sluicing. In A. Cairncross, & S. Kidwai (Eds.), The Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics, 12, 47-78.
Other activities and roles
Talks:
- Oct 2022. Intervention in Accusative Case Assignment in Urdu. Talk given at Syntax and Morphology Circle (SMircle), Stanford University.
- Sep 2022. Marked Anticausatives in Urdu. Talk given at Syntax and Semantics Circle (SSCircle), University of California, Berkeley.
- Jun 2022. What is a Subject? A Survey of Urdu Subjects. Talk given at SyntaxLab, University of Cambridge.
- Feb 2021. The Urdu Active Impersonal. Talk given at SyntaxLab, University of Cambridge.
- Jun 2020. Accusative case and the verbal domain in Hindi-Urdu. Talk given at SyntaxLab, University of Cambridge.
- May 2019. Resolving -ko in Urdu. Talk given at SyntaxLab, University of Cambridge.
Outreach:
- 2018-22. Co-editor of The Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics.
- 2021-22. Interviewer for University of Cambridge Linguistics tripos undergraduate admissions at Fitzwilliam College (2021, 2022), Lucy Cavendish College (2021), and Churchill College (2022).
- 2021. Supervisor for Corpus Christi College Bridging Course.
Student representation:
- 2020-21. Vice-President of Fitzwilliam College MCR.
- 2019-20. Social secretary of Fitzwilliam College MCR.
Personal website
