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
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.
06/09/2025: I defended my first GP titled “Negative meaning without negation: case of bərə in Marathi” advised by Rajesh Bhatt and María Biezma.
04/12/2025: I was at FASAL15 held at UT-Austin. I presented my first GP on Marathi discourse particle bərə.
