Lewis C. Lawyer

Lewis' PhD research centers around describing Patwin, an under-described Native American language of the Wintuan language family with very few remaining speakers.  Though a fair amount of Patwin materials are available in archives, little has been published about Patwin linguistics.  Aside from a few papers published by Kenneth Whistler in the 1970's and 1980's, the existing grammatical descriptions of Patwin are sketchy and unreliable.  A good descriptive reference is needed now, with interest in language revitalization on the rise in heritage Patwin-speaking communities.  Lewis aims to create quality descriptive work on Patwin useful to linguists and members of the community alike.

• Word-order typology: examining structural correlates of prenominal relative constructions in the light of theories of head-position harmony.  A paper is forthcoming.
  
• Using the Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) framework as a descriptive tool: an f-structure analysis of Walman and-verbs (using data from Brown and Dryer's 2008 article in Language).  Lewis' paper is available in the LFG10 conference proceedings here.  A pdf file of the poster presented at LFG10 can be found here.
• Work with the Corina Lab: collaboration on neurolinguistic projects with David Corina and Laurel Lawyer at the UCD Center for Mind and Brain
  
• Data mining: working in a data-mining group at the search engine Ask.com
  

Lewis received a BA and linguistics and a BA in music from the University of Southern California, where he studied jazz trombone and linguistics.  He received an MPhil from the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, where he studied anaphora and intonation in Papuan languages, and varieties of British cheeses (informally).

Lewis' academic CV can be found here.