Jonathan Walls

Jonathan is a graduate research assistant in the Language and Brain Laboratory. His work entails writing Python code to support the FlexSR speech recognition project, and has previously involved labeling Praat data for an examination of Bengali English and aspiration patterns, as well as helping to run EEG experimentation, among other duties.

Background
He is a current DPhil student at Oxford in Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, and completed his MPhil at the University of Oxford in Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics. He studied Russian (BA), French (BA), and Italian (BA) during his undergraduate studies at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma. As a part of his studies, he spent an academic year in St. Petersburg, Russia, studying Russian language and culture at the St. Petersburg Politechnic University. Additionally, he spent an intensive summer course at the Université Grenoble Alpes studying French language.
Previous Research/Teaching
During his MPhil, he completed a thesis discussing the underlying algorithm for the stress system of the Hittite language. This work created a level-ordered system for Hittite phonology and a framework that explains the behavior of clitic chains and preservation of long vowels, and identifies probable locations of secondary stress in Hittite. His secondary area of study was in Celtic and Old Irish.
Before arriving at Oxford, his research focused on the Pamir languages found in Central Asia, a small subgroup of the Indo-Iranian language family. His undergraduate thesis for his Russian studies was a translation of Tatyana Pakhalina's foundational descriptive work on these languages from the original Russian into English.
Current Research Interests
Jonathan's current research interests are focused on the Anatolian regional languages including genetically Anatolian languages like Hittite, Luwian, Lycian, and Lydian, but also regionally significant languages like Hattian, Hurrian, and Akkadian. He is expanding his work on Hittite metrical phonology to create a broader understanding of the rule-based systems governing the Anatolian stress systems and the writing systems that communicate them, culminating in a view towards creating a reconstruction of the Proto-Anatolian stress system.