Welcome Wesley Orth

New teaching faculty with research in syntax and psycholinguistics.

Give a warm welcome to Wes Orth, who joins us this year as teaching faculty, starting off with LING 240. Wes recently completed his PhD in Linguistics at Northwestern, with a dissertation on how Active Assignment of Quantifier Scope Guides Language Processing, supervised by Maryland alum Masaya Yoshida *06. Since graduating he has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto, working with Keir Moulton. He already has a long list of major publications in syntax and psycholinguistics, a sample of which is below. So say hello when you see Wes, and ask him whether he loves it that constructions which neither someone young from New York nor old from Japan can understand with certainty have still generated interesting research elsewhere or ever will at Maryland? 

• Wesley Orth and Keir Moulton (2026), Experimental evidence from extraction for the D-shell analysis of clausal prolepsis - Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
• Wesley Orth, Shayne Sloggett and Masaya Yoshida (2026), Positive Polarity Items: An illusion of ungrammaticality - Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
• Wesley Orth and Masaya Yoshida (2025), Gaps that do not sprout - Linguistic Inquiry
• Wesley Orth and Masaya Yoshida (2023), There is something missing in NP and moving in NP - Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
• Wesley Orth, Masaya Yoshida and Shayne Sloggett (2021), Negative Polarity Item illusion is a quantification phenomenon, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Memory, Learning and Language