I'm a Professor in the Centre for Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh.
My research aims to understand how languages are shaped by learning and use. I am particularly interested in how typological universals (differences in the frequency of linguistic patterns across the world's languages) arise from properties of our cognitive system. To get at this, I teach people (children and adults) miniature artificial languages, and create computational models of their behaviour.
Most of my work focuses on syntax and morphology, e.g., word order (especially nominal word order, i.e., Greenberg's Universal 20, but also cross-category harmony), morpheme order (including the suffixing preference, the relative order of case and number, order of gender and number), noun classification systems (e.g., why certain features are encoded in these systems rather than others), person systems (e.g., what are the primitive concepts at play, how are they represented). I am also interested in the differences between adult and child learners (e.g., what cues they attend to, whether they find the same things easy to learn).
Publications
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