I am a professor at the Department of Linguistics, The University of Texas, Austin.  I study the syntax and semantics of human language.   Here is some recent work on usage-based, evolutionary and information theoretic approaches to grammar:

• Stephen Wechsler, James Shearer, and Katrin Erk 2025. The emergence of grammar through reinforcement learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.01635.

• Sasha Boguraev, Katrin Erk, Kyle Mahowald, James Shearer, and Stephen Wechsler 2025..  Reinforcement Learning Produces Efficient Case-Marking Systems. Proceedings of CogSci 2025.

• Stephen Wechsler 2025. A Usage-Based Program for Syntax and Semantics. In D. Bradley, K. Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, C. Hamans, I. H. Lee, and F. Steurs (eds.) Contemporary Linguistics: Integrating Languages, Communities, and Technologies. Netherlands: Brill, ISBN: 9789004715608, pp. 339-348.

• Kristie Denlinger, Stephen Wechsler, and Kyle Mahowald 2024. Participle-Prepended Nominals Have Lower Entropy Than Nominals Appended After the Participle. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46.

My other main research areas are:

• The relation between word meaning and syntax 

• Grammatical agreement

•  Self-reference

• Syntactic theory: lexicalism, HPSG, LFG

See the pull-down menus above for publications and other stuff.   

Contact:

• email: wechsler at austin dot utexas dot edu

• Postal address: 305 E. 23rd St. STOP B5100 / Austin, TX 78712 / USA 

• Department phone: (512) 471-1701   Fax: (512) 471-4340 

• Office: RLP 4.702, The University of Texas, Austin