Acting Assistant Professor Andrew Hedding joins the faculty this year with a 2022 PhD from University of California Santa Cruz.
Hedding is a syntactician and fieldworker with additional interests in the way(s) that syntax interfaces with phonology. To date, his work has focused on a specific variety of Mixtec, a family of indigenous languages spoken in Mexico and by immigrant communities along the West Coast of the United States. In his dissertation, How to move a focus: The syntax of Alternative Particles (dissertation committee chaired by Maziar Toosarvandani), he analyzed how semantic foci are displaced in San Martín Peras Mixtec and explored how this movement is similar to and different than wh-movement. He has also investigated other aspects of Mixtec syntax and phonology, including wh-indefinites, subextraction and pied-piping, the syntactic effects of D-linking, tone sandhi, and the prosody of fronted foci.
Hedding will be teaching a graduate seminar on focus displacement Autumn 2022. His other classes this academic year are introductory linguistics (LING 200 and 400) and the syntax sequence for undergraduates (LING 461 and 462).