Richard Futrell

PhD

Richard is interested (so far) in how the pressure of managing information transfer between speakers shapes the structure of natural language(s). In pursuit of that goal, he likes to make computational models and analyze naturalistic data in linguistic corpora. Phenomena he's worked on so far include grammatical gender and noun classifier systems, language change and grammaticalization, word order variation, typological generalizations such as the Accessibility Hierarchy, and discourse structure. His favorite languages are Mandarin, German, and Hungarian.