Kenneth Hanson

About Me

I’m a linguist specializing in computational syntax. I study syntactic dependencies such as case and agreement from the perspective of computational complexity in order to understand their locality properties, cross-linguistic variation, and how they can be learned efficiently. I am also interested in Japanese linguistics.

I received my PhD from Stony Brook University in 2025, advised by Thomas Graf. I taught as a lecturer in the Yale Linguistics Department during the 2025–2026 academic year. Previously, I worked for four years teaching English in Japan through the JET Programme.

Some other interests of mine include: music (piano, marimba, music theory), physics & astronomy, operating systems, typography, cognitive psychology, and European history.

What’s new?

2026

• My paper titled Not Just Islands: Relativized Blocking Throughout the Grammar, has been published in the Special Issue New Trends in Syntactic Islands of Languages. [ pdf | doi ]
• I presented the keynote speech at MSULC 2026 (April 25), titled Case Made Uncomplex: A Computational Perspective on the Syntax of Case.

2025

• My dissertation is available.
• My paper titled Tier-Based Strict Locality and the Typology of Agreement has been published in the Journal of Language Modeling. [ pdf | doi ]
• My CLS 60 proceedings paper is available. This is less technical presentation of the analysis in the JLM paper. [ pdf ]
• I presented at MoL 2025, talk titled The Typology of TSL Case Assignment [ paper | slides ]
• I am on three papers presented at SCiL 2025 (July 18-20):
  • Adjunction in (T)SL Syntax [ paper ]
  • (w/ Logan Swanson and Thomas Graf) Are syntactic categories ISL-2 inferrable? A corpus study [ paper ]
  • (w/ Thomas Graf) Automata for subregular syntax: Syntax with strings attached [ paper ]
• I presented at PLC 49 (April 4-6), poster titled Two Steps to Parasitic Agreement in Hindi-Urdu. [ abstract | poster ]
• I presented at the LSA 2025 Annual Meeting (Jan. 9-12), poster titled Upward Agreement and Syntactic Counterfeeding in Lubukusu. [ paper | poster ]

2024

• I presented at SYNC 2024 (Dec. 7), talk titled A Tier-Based Analysis of Parasitic Agreement in Hindi-Urdu. [ handout ]
• I presented at SCiL 2024 (June 27–29), poster titled Tiers, paths, and syntactic locality: The view from learning. [ paper | poster ]
• I presented at the Workshop on Myopia in Grammar (June 13–14), talk titled The computational basis of locality in syntactic agreement. [ slides | handout ]
• I presented at CLS 60 (April 26–28), talk titled A tier-based model of syntactic agreement. [ slides | handout ]

Contact

Email me at: mail at first name + last name dot net.