Jon Sprouse

Professor of Linguistics

Education: Ph.D., University of Maryland

Research areas: Experimental Syntax

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My research starts from two working hypotheses: (i) that there is an underlying combinatorics to human language syntax, and (ii) that this combinatorics is implemented in the human brain. I take the goal of theoretical syntax to be to map out the hypothesis space of possible combinatorial systems that could be implemented in the brain (at some level of abstraction). And I take the goal of experimental syntax to be to find whatever evidence we can to help shift probability mass around in that hypothesis space. To that end, I try to leverage as many useful methods as possible in my research, such as acceptability judgments, EEG, fMRI, and even computational modeling.