My name is Pasha Koval. My pronouns are he/him. I am a Visiting Assistant Professor in Syntactic Theory and Processing in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. Previously I was a post-doctoral associate at New York University Abu Dhabi. I hold a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Connecticut and a Specialist degree (= MA) in Linguistics from the Lomonosov Moscow State University.

I am an experimental syntactician. Broadly, I am interested in how syntactic knowledge is represented, acquired, and used. My syntactic research combines formal syntactic theory with behavioral experiments to understand what computations are necessary and sufficient to support syntactic structures. One prominent line of my work examines the relation between precedence and dominance, two fundamental dimensions of syntactic structure. I test the hypothesis that precedence relations can be derived from other properties of syntactic structure rather than need to be represented independently. The most restrictive version of this hypothesis derives linear order directly from hierarchical relations. Through a series of behavioral experiments on relative clause extraposition, I argue that this minimal view is insufficient.

I also did some work on binding and ellipsis.

Another line of my research examines how monolingual and bilingual children can deduce bits of information needed for complex syntactic rules from the input. In a long-term collaboration with Sophia Malamud, we are working on a large, syntactically-annotated, and audio-aligned corpus of bilingual and monolingual Russian child and child-directed speech. It supports systematic research on the acquisition of Russian as a heritage language using naturalistic longitudinal data.