Brett Reynolds

Linguist · Humber Polytechnic · University of Toronto

Brett Reynolds is a linguist at Humber Polytechnic and an adjunct professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto. His work asks how useful but imperfect categories hold together, what they let us infer, and where those inferences break down. In linguistics, this means English grammar and grammatical categories: syntactic annotation, usage-based and constructionist analysis, the philosophy of linguistics, and what grammaticality judgements can – and can't – tell us. He co-authored the second edition of A Student's Introduction to English Grammar (2021) and co-edited a new edition of Negation in English and Other Languages (2025). Language Landscapes (a TESL textbook) is forthcoming from Language Science Press. His current monograph is Words That Won't Hold Still: How Linguistic Categories Work, a completed manuscript under peer review at Cambridge University Press.

Research focus: category stability and inference; English grammar and grammatical categories; syntactic annotation; usage-based/constructionist analysis; philosophy of linguistics; grammaticality judgments.