Kenneth Hanson

About Me

I’m a lecturer in the Linguistics Department at Yale University. I received my PhD from Stony Brook University in 2025. My disseration advisor is Thomas Graf.

My research focuses on computational syntax. I am studying syntactic dependencies such as case and agreement from the perspective of computational complexity in order to understand their locality properties, range of formal variation, and how they can be learned from positive data. I am also interested in Japanese linguistics.

After graduating with a BA from Michigan State University (majoring in linguistics and Japanese), I worked for four years as an assistant English teacher in Japan through the JET Programme. I’ve also created some free Japanese language education materials.

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

What’s new?

2025

• My paper titled Tier-Based Strict Locality and the Typology of Agreement has been published by the Journal of Language Modeling. [ pdf | doi ]
• My CLS 60 proceedings paper is available. This is less technical version of the analysis in the JLM paper. [ pdf ]
• I am on three papers to be 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.