Research expertise: languages, grammatical systems, computational modeling

David Inman, UC Irvine language science assistant professor, received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Washington in 2019, where he studied the Nuuchahnulth language, which is an Indigenous language spoken in Canada. Since then, he has studied how languages across the world vary and how grammatical systems change over time, especially when languages are in close contact with one another. One of his current projects uses a large database and computational modeling to uncover long-term linguistic contact among the Indigenous languages of North and South America.

 

 

His work, funded by institutional graduate grants and the Jacobs Research Fund, has appeared in Linguistics, the Journal of Language Modelling, Linguistic Typology, and other publications.

Prior to pursuing a career in academia, Inman worked as a software developer for Microsoft and as a system analyst for Golder Associates, drawing from his dual bachelor’s in computer science and linguistics.

He's excited to be joining the team at UC Irvine from his most recent postdoctoral position at the University of Cote d'Azur in Nice, France, and he’s impressed by the empirically grounded research going on at UCI Language Science and the sharpness and dedication of the students he’s met on campus.