AJ Murphy

Education

Ph.D. Historical Linguistics and Syntactic Theory, University of South Carolina

M.A. Syntactic Theory, University of South Carolina

B.A. English and Classics, Marshall University

Biography

I earned my Bachelor’s degree in English & Classics at Marshall University in my hometown of Huntington, WV. Huntington is, to most people’s surprise, a town that is very like Peoria, IL–a post-industrial gem hidden along a river, my favorite kind of place.

After completing my BA in English, I began my studies as a linguist in earnest, earning my Master’s and Doctoral degrees from the University of South Carolina in historical syntax. During that time, I enjoyed about a ten-year sojourn in the South East U.S. (living in Columbia, SC and then Savannah, GA).

All of these experiences have allowed me to see the ways that language sounds and matters differently to all sorts of people, something that I love getting to experience with my students.

Teaching

I have been teaching at Bradley University since Fall 2025. At Bradley, I teach professional writing, language theory, and grammar courses. I also teach courses that discuss the overlap between language/linguistic theory and literature. Previously, I taught English and Linguistics classes at the University of South Carolina. 

In addition to teaching, I love catching up with students about their interests in language, table top games, video games, and works of fantasy. I am also lucky enough to work with my students on research, in my classes and in our Linguistics Language Lab!

Scholarship

My research takes an interdisciplinary approach to linguistics and asks how grammar and syntax can be wielded as literary tools to communicate semantic and pragmatic information. I am also particularly in ancient literature and mythology. In service of this, my research has focused on Classical Greek and Old English (among the other Germanic languages). Currently, I am working on research that uses the York-Toronto-Helsinki Corpus of Old English to analyze variations in the Old English passive construction, exploring what these variations indicate about authorial intention and themes of human agency in the face of nature and God(s).

I am also involved with the Language Conflict Project (LCP), a collaboration of linguistics, language, computer science, and political science scholars dedicated to understanding the relationship between ethno-political conflict, language policy, and language similarity/difference. For the LCP, I have helped develop the Language Distance Metric, a computational system for empirically measuring the distance between languages, quantifying lexical, grammatical, phonological, and orthographic difference. The LCP has recently published an edited volume in which I am published, titled “The Cambridge Handbook of Language and Political Conflict.”

Student Involvement Opportunities

Student Research Assistant in the Linguistics Language Lab