I am a 4th year PhD student at the Department of Linguistics at UMass Amherst. I have an MA in Linguistics from English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad and a BSc in Mathematics from Fergusson College, Pune. Before coming to UMass I briefly worked as a Conversational UX designer at an AI start-up in India.
Broadly, I am interested in understanding how conversations work - how speakers navigate and communicate implicit meaning and how unsaid meaning enters the context.
More specifically, I am interested in:
Representation of not-at-issue meaning and structure of the context and common ground.
How strategies of rejection, denial, and disagreement are encoded across languages and what the building blocks for them are.
Off-record communication and signalling strategies (Insinuations, Dogwhistles, Two-tracked conversations,…)
Discourse particles in South Asian languages and discursive strategies they conventionalize.
Thus, this grounds my research in Formal Pragmatics and its interface with Semantics on one hand and Social meaning/Philosophy of Language on the other. Apart from this, I also like thinking about Syntax, specifically:
Adverbial agreement in Indo-Aryan.
Person agreement in Marathi.
Interaction between agreement and movement.
I have a latent fascination with representation of event structures in cognition.
Email: sphadnis[at]umass[dot]edu
News
I am co-organizing an inter-disciplinary workshop on non-ideal communication and the common ground in spring 2027! check the details and a CfA here!
04/08/2026: New paper out in FASAL 15 proceedings!
03/01/2026: I gave a talk at PLC50@UPenn titled “Not on the same page: case of bərə in Marathi”.
12/22/2025: I presented my paper about puzzling Marathi discourse particle bərə at DiPSAL@IIT-Delhi.
11/22/2025: I presented my work on the English slang lowkey at SNEWS held at UMass.
