Welcome to Rutgers, Ryan Smith - Linguistics Graduate Students Association

This academic year, we’re excited to announce that a new faculty member is joining our group of semanticists! Below is an introduction that Professor Ryan Smith has shared with us.

Welcome to Rutgers Linguistics!

Hi everyone, my name is Ryan Walter Smith, and I’m thrilled to be joining the department this fall!

I grew up in the Dallas/Fort Worth area in North Texas. I got my BA in Linguistics at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and completed my PhD at the University of Arizona in 2020, with Robert Henderson and Heidi Harley as co-chairs. After that, I jumped around a little bit, starting with a visiting professorship at the University of Texas at El Paso, followed by two years in the UK at the University of Manchester, where I worked as a post-doc on Andrew Koontz-Garboden’s “Lexical semantics of lexical categories” project. After that, I was a visiting professor of semantics at The Ohio State University for a year. Needless to say, I’m very excited to be able to stay in one place and make Rutgers my new academic home!

My research interests lie primarily in semantics and pragmatics, as well as in the syntax/semantics interface. My current research focuses on the expression of stative and change-of-state predicates cross-linguistically. Within this broad domain, I am especially interested in the lexical semantics of abstract mass nouns, change-of-state in the nominal domain, decompositional analyses of stative predicates and attitude reports (especially memory reports), state/change-of-state lability, and resultatives. I also maintain an interest in plurality, especially understudied varieties of plurals like similative and associative plurals, which was the topic of my dissertation and first journal article. Much of my work is based on elicitation work done with speakers of various Iranian languages, especially Persian and Sorani Kurdish. I’ve also worked on Kurmanji Kurdish, Zazaki, Ossetian, and Balochi, among other Iranian languages. Japanese is also near and dear to my heart and plays a role in much of my research.

When I’m not doing linguistics, I enjoy playing classical guitar, taking pictures of wildlife (see some examples below), traveling with my wife Kristina, and listening to music (my top genres are early 70’s progressive rock, doom metal, indie rock, and turbo folk). I also like learning languages for fun. My current language-learning focus is Serbian (BCMS), which is spoken by much of my wife’s family.

I’m looking forward to getting to know everyone and working with all of you here at Rutgers!