Connor Caston Rouillier

Research

My research primarily centers on understanding the relationship between morphology, syntax, and cognition.  In particular, I ask two related questions. First, how do speakers utilize their language to convey concepts to others  and model the world? Second, how do listeners utilize that information to assess validity of language in the world.  In service of this goal, my research has focused on agreement phenomena, which convey both structural and semantic information.  

In particular, I have specialized in Arabic agreement phenomena, focusing primarily on Najdi Arabic, a variety spoken in Central Saudi Arabia.  My research uses formal and experimental methods to explore morphosyntactic variation in cases in which the competing forms are grammatically distinct but truth-conditionally equivalent.