Rate My Professor Robert Henderson

Henderson's research focuses on formal semantics and pragmatics, logic and language, prosody and prosodic morphology, and the documentation of Mesoamerican indigenous languages, particularly Mayan languages such as Kaqchikel and Uspanteko, informed by extensive fieldwork in Guatemala. Active projects include village sign languages in Mesoamerica as co-PI on a CNRS-UA grant, compositional morphosemantics of plurality in southwestern languages like Hiaki and Seri as PI on an NSF grant, and MesoUD syntactically annotated corpora for Mesoamerican languages as NSF co-PI. Key publications feature the book Signaling without Saying: The semantics and pragmatics of dogwhistles (with Elin McCready, Oxford University Press, 2024); "Vowel deletion as grammatically controlled gestural overlap in Uspanteko" (with Ryan Bennett and Meg Harvey, Language 99(3), 2023); "Donkeys under discussion" (with Lucas Champollion and Dylan Bumford, Semantics & Pragmatics 12, 2019); "The roots of measurement" (Glossa 4(1), 2019); "Expressive updates, much?" (with Daniel Gutzmann, Language 95(1), 2019); and "Prosodic smothering in Macedonian and Kaqchikel" (with Ryan Bennett and Boris Harizanov, Linguistic Inquiry 49(2), 2018). He has received major funding including NSF grants for $448,980 (2020), $166,923 (2016), and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2009-2012), and serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Semantics since 2017.