Jason D Smith

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the UCLA Department of Linguistics, funded by the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship: SPRF Award Number 2404659: A Cross-Linguistic Study of Complex Verbal Predicates), working with Harold Torrence. 

My research  centers on descriptive and theoretical syntax, with a focus on bringing novel data from un- or under-studied languages to bear in the development and refinement of syntactic theory. In my dissertation The Clausal Structure of Mende  (Michigan State University 2024), I show that Mende (a Mande language of Sierra Leone) has both OV and VO word order and argue that both are derived from an underlying head-initial verb phrase. 

In my postdoctoral research, I partner with researchers at Njala University in Bo, Sierra Leone, and Université Général Lansana Conté de Sonfonia in Conakry, Guinea, to elicit, describe, and analyze syntactic data from the Mande languages Mende, Kono, Susu, and Loko.  My primary focus is on word order, considering in particular the structure of verb phrases. I also train linguistic researchers to document their own languages. 

I have also investigated wh-questions, islands, and resumption in Mende, arguing for a tripartite distinction with weak islands, strong islands, and mixed islands (relative clauses). I have recently begun to investigate information structure in Mende, considering whether different types of focus are expressed distinctively in the language.