I study what it is about humans that lets us, and no other animals, use language¹. Linguists call this capacity for language the “human language faculty.” Because language is something we do with our minds, Linguists like to categorize our discipline as a part of the cognitive sciences.

In particular, I study the aspect of the human language faculty known as Syntax. You can think of syntactic research as being about grammar, but there is a very important distinction to be made between syntactic research and traditional grammar studies. When learning French, I was taught “the proper way” to speak French, including, for example, when and how to use the subjunctive. This, despite the subjunctive being completely optional in many varieties of French. In this way, my study of French, as a language learner, was a prescriptive process. I was, at times implicitly, told that there was a correct form of French and instructed in its use.

Syntactic research, and indeed linguistic research more broadly, explicitly eschews the prescriptive stance of the grammarian, which asserts how people should use language. Instead, we adopt a descriptive approach, seeking to understand how people actually do use language². Linguists do not take it upon ourselves to proclaim any particular language variety as the correct variety. As a linguist, I often find myself saying “I’m not judging your grammar, I’m just analyzing it³.”

Syntacticians seek out precisely these sorts of variations across language varieties with the ultimate aim of identifying to what extent language varieties can differ from each other and to what extent they cannot. In exploring what all language varieties do or do not have in common, we hope to learn about that aspect of the human that facilitates our ability to create language and, in turn, what makes humanity unique.

For a technical overview of my research please see this (longer) research summary I wrote for in late 2019, and this (shorter) research statement I wrote in 2020.