About Me

Hello! My name is William Johnston. I’m a syntactician, a semanticist, and a fieldworker.

My research investigates the shared grammatical structures fundamental to all languages—especially the structure of the verbal and prepositional domains. I also work with speakers of Hmong to describe and analyze their language. (Find out more via the links above.)

Currently I hold a postdoctoral fellowship at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Richard Compton is my supervisor. My PhD is from McGill University, and my thesis on event structure and serial verbs in Hmong was supervised by Jessica Coon and Luis Alonso-Ovalle.

Outside of linguistics, I love cooking, the Minnesota Vikings, and writing.