Get to know our newest faculty member! Scott is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics.
What got you interested in the field of linguistics?
When I was learning Spanish in high school, what interested me the most was the structural differences between English and Spanish. Particularly, pro-drop fascinated me. In my first year of college, one of my classes was directly after an intro to linguistics course. One day I saw phrase structure trees and immediately had to ask what the class was. Around that same time, I started reading some of Chomsky's political writing and found out he was a linguist as well. Pretty much since then I've known that I wanted to be a linguist in some capacity. Before committing to academia, I was pursuing a career as a musician. My love for sound is what ultimately drew me to phonetics and phonology.
What is your current area of research?
My current area of research is computational/mathematical phonology. I'm primarily interested in formal models of phonological and phonetic knowledge and how those two domains interact. I use ideas from theoretical computer science (model theory, programming language theory, logic, automata) to study our cognitive capacities relating to the internalization and externalization of language. Specific projects I'm working on right now include formalizing the competence/performance distinction using weighted logic, recasting representational solutions in phonological theory (e.g., underspecification, feature spreading) as specific computational structures, showing how optional phonological processes do not change the computational expressivity of phonology, and using function types to characterize the role of phonological knowledge in language perception. I also have a handful of projects I'm working on with students in related areas.
What attracted you to the linguistics department at the University of Illinois?
I'm from the midwest and also did my BA and MA at a Big Ten school, so the campus felt very familiar. The linguistics department at UIUC also has a storied history in phonetics and phonology. The faculty and students are also incredibly friendly, supportive, and motivated. I think all three of those things work together towards making this an attractive place for me. It's a great place to be and I'm glad that I landed here!
What do you hope to accomplish during your time at the University of Illinois?
This is a BIG question. I think there is lots of research I hope to accomplish here, and I hope to continue growing my research group so I can pass on everything I love about being a linguist. For me, the work needs to be taken extremely seriously, but I think there also should be room for a little bit of experimentation, creativity, and sometimes even absurdness. Everything new was discovered by someone saying, "what if...", and sometimes you just have to see where those ideas take you even if they seem a little out there. So I guess my answer is that I hope I can build up a community of students and collaborators that take this type of approach and discover new and interesting things about the relationship between phonological and phonetic knowledge!
