Kaden Holladay
Visiting Assistant Professor
Western Washington University
[ˈkʰeɪ.dɪn ˈhɑ.lə.deɪ] he/him
About. I am a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Western Washington University. I specialize in morphology, syntax, and their interface with semantics. In August of last year I received my PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (see the dissertation defense handout).
♢♢♢
Contact. firstname.lastname@wwu.edu
♢♢♢
Research. The goal of my dissertation, advised by Kyle Johnson, Rajesh Bhatt, and James Cathey, was to derive the typology of person contrasts in natural language. There’s a special focus on the relation between what person does (semantically, qua indexical) on the one hand, and how person presents itself morphologically on the other. That relation isn’t trivial, which is a good thing — it means that there aren’t many syntaxes which could derive in tandem the morphological and semantic facts. The theory of person developed in the dissertation was informed by both these kinds of data. (You can read more about this topic in this paper.)
Other topics I’ve worked on include Right Node Raising, VP ellipsis, suppletive allomorphy, and in joint work word-order typology from a computational perspective. Like with my dissertation topic, my work on these typically proceeds with an eye toward interpretation. I’ve also worked on more phonologically-oriented morphological problems (Finnish lenition, for example, and the interaction between polysynthesis and metrical structure in Central Alaskan Yup’ik).
♢♢♢
Teaching. This academic year I teach undergraduate introductory linguistics courses (Introduction to Language and Linguistics and the Honors Colloquium in Linguistics), as well as advanced ones (Morphology and Syntax, Topics in Morphology and Syntax) at Western. While in graduate school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I likewise taught and/or TA’d undergraduate linguistics courses, including Introduction to Linguistic Theory, Introduction to Syntax, and Field Methods.
Before I went to UMass I was a teaching assistant for the Institute for Linguistics, Image, and Text (LIT), a Hampshire College summer program led by Daniel Altshuler. LIT’s objective was to apply insights from semantics and discourse coherence theory in the analysis of poetic and literary verse, comics, film, graphic novels, comics, and other forms of visual art. (You can read more about ‘super-linguistics’ here.)
♢♢♢
Biography. Via Rotary International‘s youth exchange program, I spent a year of high school in Finland. Learning Finnish (or rather, struggling to learn it) catalyzed my interest in linguistics. I pursed that interest at Hampshire College (and also at the University of Edinburgh, which I attended on collegiate exchange). Daniel Altshuler advised my undergraduate thesis, “Discourse coherence and mood in Central Alaskan Yup’ik.” That project, which involved original fieldwork in Alaska, investigated whether and how inter-clausal meaning is encoded by the Yup’ik inflectional system. I received my BA from Hampshire in 2016, and began my doctoral studies at UMass Amherst the following year.
♢♢♢
Miscellania. I hike, rock climb, and ski. My Erdős number is 5. I love cats and dogs equally.
Kaden Holladay 