Emily Lindsay- Smith
I am a Postdoctoral Researcher, working on the EPSRC-funded Pertinacity grant (2022-2027) and the ERC-funded PAAL grant (2025-2031). I focus on computational linguistics and phonology
I am primarily interested in how words are structured, how they are processed in the brain and how they can be recognised by computers. In particular, I am interested in:
- Speech Recognition
- Stress and metrical structures
- Analogical Change
- Affixation and cliticisation
- Morphological and phonological processing
Previously, I worked at the Surrey Morphology Group as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow researching typological patterns in analogy. I have also worked as an Outreach Officer and Departmental Lecturer in Phonology at the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, responsible for graduate lectures in Phonology, Psycholinguistics and Historical Linguistics, as well as undergraduate Dynamic Phonetics.
I completed my DPhil in 2021 on the phonological typology of sixteen modern Arabic varieties, looking at their syllable structure, stress and affixation. My interest (and proficiency) in Arabic comes from my undergraduate degree in Oriental Studies (Arabic with Turkish) that I completed at Oxford before undertaking my MPhil here in the Faculty of Linguistics.
ARTICLES
Lindsay-Smith, Emily (2024). Affix not clitic-based vowel shortening in Modern Arabic Varieties. Transactions of the Philological Society. DOI:10.1111/1467-968X.12287
Lindsay-Smith, Emily, Baerman, Matthew, Beniamine, Sacha, Sims-Williams, Helen and Erich Round (2024). Analogy in Inflection. Annual Review of Linguistics 10:211-31. DOI:10.1146/annurev-linguistics-030521-040935
CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS
Lahiri, Aditi, Booth, Joshua, Fritz, Isabella, Lindsay-Smith, Emily, and Hilary Wynne. (accepted) Pertinacity in diachrony and synchrony. 26th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (Heidelberg, Germany). https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a1f73133-4555-4ffd-b258-6b7f9b84ef3d
Edited Volumes:
2025. Holly Kennard, Emily Lindsay-Smith, Aditi Lahiri and Martin Maiden (Eds.). Historical Linguistics 2022: Selected papers from the 25th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Oxford, 1–5 August 2022. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Round, Erich, Mann, Stephen, Beniamine, Sacha, Lindsay-Smith, Emily, Esher, Louise, and Matt Spike (2022). Cognition and the stability of evolving complex morphology: an agent-based model. Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE), Kanazawa, Japan.
The 25th International Conference on Historical Linguistics was held in Oxford in August 2022, organised primarily by Holly Kennard, Emily Lindsay-Smith, Aditi Lahiri and Martin Maiden. It brought together historical linguists and specialists in related fields to explore advances in areas including methods and practices of linguistic reconstruction; formal approaches to language change; historical sociolinguistics; computational approaches to historical linguistics; contact and areal linguistics; interfaces between historical linguistics and other disciplines; and many other related areas. ICHL25 hosted 412 participants, including 101 students, from 185 academic institutions. Participants came from 43 countries - from Australia to Ghana to UAE to Canada to Eastern & Western Europe - to present 288 papers and 59 posters. A selection of papers has been published in our conference proceedings:
2025. Holly Kennard, Emily Lindsay-Smith, Aditi Lahiri and Martin Maiden (Eds.). Historical Linguistics 2022: Selected papers from the 25th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Oxford, 1–5 August 2022. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company
SELECT TALKS AND PRESENTATIONS
Modelling Phonological Representations. Invited talk to be given with Henning Reetz at Pertinacious Phonology and Morphology workshop, London, Sept 2024.
Flexible Speech Recognition. Presentation at the Pertinacity Workshop, Oxford, May 2024
Cognition and the stability of evolving complex morphology: an agent-based model. Poster given at EvoLang2022 with Erich Round, Stephen Mann, Sacha Beniamine, Louise Esher, and Matt Spike.
Challenging the Clitic Status of Arabic Bound Formatives. Poster given at the 5th American International Morphology Meeting, Sept 2021.
Revisiting the Phonological Typology of Modern Arabic Varieties. Talk given at LAGB, September 2021.
Personal website:
