Brandon Waldon

I’m an assistant professor in the University of South Carolina’s Linguistics Program and Department of Philosophy. I also co-direct the Legal Interpretation and Technology (LegIT) lab at Georgetown University.

My research examines the ways in which context, linguistic meaning, and social cognition jointly enable linguistic communication. Some of my interests within linguistic theory include modality, vagueness/imprecision, and conversational implicature. I approach these topics using a variety of tools, including formal analysis, psycholinguistic experimentation, and computational modeling.

Much of my recent work applies analytical insights from linguistics and philosophy of language to help lawyers, judges, and the public navigate challenging problems of legal textual analysis. With linguist and law scholar collaborators, I’ve co-authored three amicus briefs filed in Supreme Court statutory interpretation cases. One of these briefs was cited by a 7-2 Supreme Court majority in Bondi v. VanDerStok.

Previously, I was a postdoc in Computer Science, Linguistics, and Public Policy at Georgetown, where I was affiliated with Nathan Schneider’s NERT lab, Computational Linguistics @ Georgetown (GUCL), and the Massive Data Institute. I was supported in part by a Fritz Fellowship in Georgetown’s Tech & Society Initiative.

I received my PhD in Linguistics at Stanford, where I was advised by Cleo Condoravdi and Judith Degen. I was supported in part by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Before Stanford, I was a Fulbright scholar at Leibniz-ZAS Berlin and a BA student at UChicago.

Preferred pronouns: he/him/his