John A. Prado

Welcome! John here. I am a pre-doctoral linguistics student in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University and a research assistant in the Departments of Slavic Languages, Computer Science, and Psychology here. My primary applied interests are language documentation & pedagogy and my theoretical interests are semantics—pragmatics & discourse.

Previously, I have earned an M.A. in classical language pedagogy and a B.A. in linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin. I hold a Texas State EC–12 teaching certificate for Latin; my practice is informed by the Culturally Responsive Teaching framework. Please get in touch! I'm reachable via email: [ jap2336 "at" columbia "dot" edu ].

My surname is the Spanish word for "meadow." The English speaker will be most comfortable saying [pɹɑdoʊ̯], but the Spanish realization is [pɾɑðo].

Ongoing Work

Conjunction and Discourse Structure in Cherokee

Cherokee conjunctions ᎠᎴ (ALE) and Ꮓ (=HNO) are introduced in the pedagogical literature as equivalents for English and (Holmes & Smith 1976). In this qualitative corpus study of Feeling et al. (2018) and Montgomery-Anderson (2015), I argue that surface-reading phenomena (ALE has an additional disjunctive interpretation; =HNO a causal one) are explainable with ALE on a representational level of discourse and =HNO on an interactional level. This project was introduced at the 2025 LSA Summer Linguistics Institute: see the poster.

Decolonizing Artistic Language Construction

Since Okrand's Klingon (1985), a new art form, referred most commonly as the "conlang" (or constructed language), has seen an explosive rise in popularity in virtual spaces. Still in its infancy according to Peterson & Peterson (2024), I argue that this marriage of art and (language) science must confront and interrogate both the artistic and linguistic colonialities by which it is constituted in order to mature into a socially engaged practice. This paper was delivered at LCC 2025: see the abstract and slides.

Stress—Weight Interfacing in Latin Elegiac Pentameter

The Roman poets, whose language had salient word stress, co-opted many of the Greek quantitative meters despite a not-quite-compatible prosody. Following Ryan (2017), who shows how word stress indexes to the hexameter, I argue that the interaction between stress and syllable weight is generated in the dactylic pentameter by the same generative algorithm as the hexameter, but with a characteristic metrical constraint violation. This paper was delivered at CAMWS 2025: see the abstract and slides.

Focus-Narrowing in Latin Polarity Questions

Non-rhetorical polarity questions undergo focus raising in a process not unlike the T-to-C transformations that derive English polarity questions. The focused element is raised to the Spec-CP position; it is usually marked with the clitic =ne, in the C node. Studies of =ne, like Schrickx (2017), usually pay more attention to illocutionary force of the containing question than the semantics of =ne's hosts, so I investigate this relationship with oblique nominal arguments: I find that some are prevented from raising by their semantics.