Kaden Holladay
[ˈkʰej.dɪn ˈhɑ.lə.dej] he/him
Departmental Associate,
Department of Linguistics,
Harvard University
About. I am an Associate of the Department of Linguistics at Harvard University. Prior to that I was an Annual Lecturer at Harvard and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Western Washington University.
My expertise is in syntax, morphology, and their interface with semantics. I have side interests in formal language theory and in bird communication.
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Contact. kholladay[at]fas.harvard.edu
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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, and suppletive allomorphy. In joint projects, I’ve worked on word-order typology from a computational perspective, and on clausal extraposition in Georgian. 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).
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Teaching and advising. At Harvard, I taught a mix of graduate and advanced undergraduate courses (mostly in syntax), and advised a handful of qualifying papers for doctoral students. At Western Washington University I taught introductory linguistics and advanced undergraduate morphology and syntax.
In the distant past 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.)
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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. After finishing my PhD in 2023, I held a one-year position at Western Washington University.
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Miscellania. My Erdős number is 5. I hike, rock climb, and ski (but mostly, I bird).
