SCOTT ANDERBOIS AT BROWN

Scott Anderbois graduated with the PhD in linguistics from UCSC in 2011. Last spring, he accepted a permanent position in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. We checked in with Scott to get his perspective on his new situation and on his path from dissertation to tenure-track position.

WHASC: Congratulations on your new position, Scott. Could you tell us about your current situation: What’s the environment like? Who are your colleagues?

Scott: I just started here at Brown as an Assistant Professor. Our department is Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, and it is really exciting to get to know folks doing work in all sorts of areas in, around, and (well) beyond linguistics. For example, one project I’ve been working on has to do with the discourse behavior of attitude reports in Yucatec Maya, and so it is great to have colleagues right down the hall who work on issues like how children acquire mental representations and how adults reason over them. Beyond my department, there’s a very active research community here in Latin American studies (e.g. there was recently a roundtable discussion of researchers working on indigenous languages of Mesoamerica), a burgeoning Native American and Indigenous studies group, and lots of other folks doing interesting work! The other language folks in the department here are Sheila Blumstein, Uriel Cohen-Priva, Laura Kertz, Jim Morgan, and Pauline Jacobson. We have a small PhD program in Linguistics which we are hoping to grow a bit now that the faculty has grown (I am the third new linguistics hire in 4 years).

WHASC: What are you working on? Who are you working with?

Scott: Aside from the attitude reports project I mentioned above, I have been working on a project on evidentials investigating variation between evidentials across different evidence types and across languages and to what extent these differences are semantic, syntactic, or pragmatic. I also have an ongoing project with Grant Armstrong (a faculty member in the Spanish department at the University of Wisconsin) examining the syntax and semantics of complementation in Yucatec Maya. So far, we’ve been focusing on complements of control verbs which have (radically) different forms for transitive vs intransitive complements.

I have had the great luxury to not be teaching this fall and have extra time to work on research and getting settled in to life at Brown. This spring, I’ll be teaching an introduction to pragmatics and also a topics course on evidentials.

WHASC: What was your path from the PhD at Santa Cruz to your current situation? Was it tough? Was it enjoyable?

Scott: I was a visiting assistant professor for the past two years, first at UConn and then at Rochester. Moving around a lot is never easy, I think, and being the internal candidate for tenure track jobs at both places was pretty tough, as you might imagine. But I developed some good friendships, especially at Rochester this past year, and I think my experiences at both places were invaluable. I think that was especially so since both places have rich interactions between linguists and cognitive science more generally, so having those kinds of interactions in reading groups, talks, and so on really prepared me well for my position here at Brown.

WHASC: What would you say to students here who are aiming for the same career trajectory as yourself? What’s the best way to prepare oneself?

Scott: I would say one piece of advice I would give is to make sure you are thinking broadly about your work, how it fits into the big picture, and why folks outside of your area of specialization should care about it. Try to present your work to lots of different kinds of audiences, talk with folks in different disciplines and different areas of linguistics and different perspectives.

WHASC: How’s the weather?

Scott: Fall in New England is phenomenal! Leaves turning, a chill in the air, really nice! I might change my tune in a few months once winter comes, but I also suspect at least for this year, I will just be thankful it’s warmer than Rochester!

WHASC: Any chance you’ll be back to visit?

Scott: No current plans to visit, but I am always looking for excuses! My wife Sue and I did some hiking in Yosemite this summer and visited friends in the Bay Area (including Jeremy O’Brien and Judith Fiedler!), but sadly didn’t make it down to Santa Cruz this time.