Hello — I’m Shaunak 👋

I am a 3rd 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 through their responses in a discourse. 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 langauges and what the building blocks for them are.
• Off-record communication and signaling 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.

I have a latent fascination with representation of event structures in cognition.

Email: sphadnis[at]umass[dot]edu

News

• 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.