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Address Linguistics Department
Swarthmore College
Pearson Hall
500 College Avenue
Swarthmore PA 19081
Email aowusu1(at)swarthmore(dot)edu
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About me:
I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. I received my Ph.D. in Linguistics from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. My dissertation, Cross-Categorial Definiteness/Familiarity, explored the semantics of the Akan definite determiner in both nominal and clausal domains; my committee included Simon Charlow (chair), Veneeta Dayal, Viviane Deprez, and Malte Zimmermann (external).
Before coming to Swarthmore, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor and Presidential Fellow at Yale University (July 2024–July 2025) and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Boston College (July 2021–July 2024).
As a semanticist, my research examines how African languages contribute to linguistic theory. I apply current syntactic and semantic frameworks to Akan, a Niger-Congo (Kwa) language spoken in Ghana, and to other Kwa languages, both to account for empirical data and to support or challenge existing theories. I aim to inspire native-speaker linguists to pursue formal syntactic and semantic analysis of African languages. My research interests include definiteness, as well as modality, tense, aspect, and serial verb constructions.
I have taught a wide range of students and courses. In addition to core linguistics classes (semantics, morphology, syntax, and phonology), I offer courses on: (i) the role of African languages in shaping linguistic theory, (ii) the socio-economic impact of multilingualism across the African continent, and (iii) the influence of English in post-colonial Africa and the Caribbean, including the study of pidgins, creoles, and their relationships to Black American English.
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