Degree Pursued: PhD

Anticipated Degree Year: 2026

Committee Chair/Advisor: Miloje Despic, Helena Aparicio

Discipline: Linguistics 

Primary Language: Indonesian, Burmese, Spanish, Vietnamese

Research Countries: Indonesia

Research Interests: Nianpo studies how syntactic principles determine the structure of sentences in human languages, using both theoretical and experimental approaches. Her research focuses on Nuosu Yi, a minority language spoken by the Yi people in the mountainous regions of Southwest China. Unlike typical classifier languages such as Mandarin and Japanese, Nuosu Yi stands out for having a definite determiner (similar to “the” in English). By examining how classifiers interact with the definite determiner in Nuosu Yi, Nianpo's work sheds light on cross-linguistic patterns in determiner phrase structure. She also conducts linguistic experiments to explore how Nuosu Yi determiner phrases convey semantic meanings, particularly in marking definiteness.