About ME

I am currently pursuing a PhD in linguistics at Stony Brook Unviersity, where I mostly research syntax. My academic advisor is John Frederick Bailyn.

I am currently finishing my dissertation, Projecting (your) voice: A theory of inversion and defective circumvention.

Before that, I completed a BA at New York University, where I double majored in linguistics and sociology, with a minor in Spanish.

I was born and grew up in Fayetteville, Arkansas, except for the year of high school that I spent in Asunción, Paraguay with the Rotary Youth Exchange Program. As such, I am a native speaker of Ozark English and a non-native speaker of Paraguayan Spanish. I am also currently making (or have made) attempts at aquiring Russian, Brazilian Portugese, and Setswana.

Outside of linguistics, I enjoy reading about sociology, behavioral psychology, gender and sexuality theory, ecology, and Lord of the Rings.

A note on my name: My first name is not John, it is John David. This follows the naming convention of double first names, which, while not specific to the southern United States, is quite popular there. I can be felicitously referred to as John David or JD, but never just John (and especially not just David). While represented orthographically as two words, my name is best conceived of as a single constituent with the phonetic form /ʤɑnˈdeɪvɪd/ or /'ʤeɪ'di/.