Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Bradley McDonnell

Congratulations Dr. Bradley McDonnell, Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department for receiving the 2020 College of Languages, Linguistics & Literature Excellence in Teaching Award!

In 2019, Bradley also received a 4-year National Science Foundation grant to investigate language use in a multi-lingual community. This project aims to document the linguistic practices of the Nasal speech community in Bengkulu province, Indonesia. 

In his own words, “he primarily conducts research in the fields of syntax, pragmatics, discourse, phonetics, phonology, and language documentation. He employs both traditional methods in his approach to field linguistics and linguistic analysis as well as newly developed methods in documentary linguistics and statistical approaches to linguistic analysis.  He also takes an integrated approach to explain linguistic structure, including historical, social, communicative, and cognitive factors.”

Bradley completed his dissertation, Symmetrical voice constructions in Besemah: A usage-based approach at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in June 2016. It is a study of the syntactic and discourse properties of symmetrical voice in Besemah, Sumatra.