Dunstan Brown
Anniversary Professor

Profile

Biography

Dunstan Brown is a morphologist and typologist. He is interested in complex morphological systems and understanding the world’s linguistic diversity.

Career

• Surrey University
  
  • Research Fellow 1992-1998
  • Foundation Fund Lecturer in Linguistics and Russian Language 1998-2001
  • Lecturer in Linguistics and Russian Language 2001-2005
  • Senior Lecturer in Linguistics 2005-2012
  • Professor in Linguistics April 2012-Sept. 2012
• University of York
  
  • Anniversary Professor 2012-2016
  • Anniversary Professor and Head of the Department of Language and Linguistic Science 2016-2021
  • Anniversary Professor 2021-

Research

Projects

Matches and mismatches in nominal morphology and agreement: Learning from the acquisition of Eegimaa

Period of award: April 2017 to July 2020
Grant: ESRC & AHRC

Investigators: Dunstan Brown, Serge Sagna, Marilyn Vihman

Project outputs

• Preserving local culture and enabling wider communication: the case of Eegimaa

Period of award: February and March 2017

Grant: Newton Fund

Investigators: Dunstan Brown and Serge Sagna

Recently Completed Projects (since 2010)

• Feast and Famine: Confronting Overabundance and Defectivity in Language
  Period of Award: Aug 20 - Aug 24
  Grant: AHRC
  Leverhulme International Fellowship
  Enhancing comparability: modelling linguistic systems to advance typology
  Period of Award: Sept 2021-December 2022
  Grant: Leverhulme Trust
  
  
• Endangered complexity: inflectional classes in Oto-Manguean languages
  Period of award: March 2012 to February 2015 
  Grant : AHRC & ESRC 
  Investigators: Dunstan Brown, Matthew Baerman (Surrey), Greville Corbett (Surrey), Enrique Palancar (CNRS and Surrey)
  
  
• From competing theories to fieldwork: the challenge of an extreme agreement system
  Period of award: January 2012 to December 2014 
  Grant: AHRC 
  Investigators: Dunstan Brown, Bob Borsley (Essex), Greville Corbett (Surrey), Maria Polinsky (Harvard), Louisa Sadler (Essex). Researcher: Marina Chumakina (Surrey)
  
  
• Morphological complexity: typology as a tool for delineating cognitive organization
  Period of award: Feb 2009 - Jan 2014
  Grant: ERC 
  Investigators: Greville G. Corbett (Surrey), Matthew Baerman (Surrey), Dunstan Brown

Research group(s)

• Phonetics and phonology
• Syntax and semantics
• Centre for Linguistic History and Diversity

Available PhD research projects

I am happy to supervise research projects on morphology, including computational and theoretical approaches, morphology-syntax interaction and typology.

Teaching

Undergraduate

Semester 1:

• Morphology (LAN00083H)

Semester 2:

• English Corpus Linguistics (LAN00032H)
• Typology: Structures of the World’s Languages (LAN00052H)

Postgraduate

• Research Training Seminar (session on using corpora)