Will Standing

I work as a P hD student on the Mind-Bending Grammars project. The focus of my PhD research is on cognitive and social mechanisms underlying changes in cleft constructions across the lifespan. My previous research interests have primarily lain in language change in ancient Germanic, reconstruction and experimental models of analysis. I have conducted research on a variety of languages, primarily in the context of syntactic change and attempts to incorporate new techniques to glean new information from historical data. This background has prepared me well for a research program encompassing the full spectrum of pressures acting on language change.

I completed a Masters (2015) and Bachelors (2014) in Linguistics from the University of Manchester specialising in historical linguistics and writing my thesis on a reconstruction of North-West Germanic relative pronouns. Subsequently I have worked in an assistant capacity on a variety of projects, notably on information structure in Latin and bare noun phrases in Old English, and attended the SUM-UP 2016 conference in Potsdam at which I presented part of my MA thesis.