# Brett Reynolds

> Academic website for Brett Reynolds, with work on English grammar, linguistic categories, homeostatic property clusters, pragmatics, grammaticality, and LLMs as boundary phenomena.

## Core Machine-Readable Papers

- [Adversarial Pragmatics for AI Safety Evaluation: A Benchmark for Instruction Conflict, Embedded Commands, and Policy Ambiguity](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/adversarial-pragmatics-for-ai-safety-evaluation/paper.md): A linguistically controlled benchmark and annotation protocol for evaluating language-model behaviour under instruction conflict, embedded commands, quotation, scope ambiguity, deixis, indirect speech acts, and multi-turn agent transcripts. Status: arXiv preprint. Canonical record: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01153
- [Bridge Principles without UG: Projectibility, Crosslinguistic Evidence, and Linguistic Ontology](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/bridge-principles-without-ug/paper.md): A projectibility-first account of why crosslinguistic inference needs bridge principles without making Universal Grammar the only possible licence for evidential travel. Status: Preprint. Canonical record: https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/010104
- [Truth-Tracking Profiles: What Large Language Models Participate In](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/truth-tracking-profiles/paper.md): A profile account of how large language models participate in stabilizing routes to truth-tracking success. Status: Preprint. Canonical record: https://philarchive.org/rec/REYTPW
- [Not every stable cluster is homeostatic: Stability, network order, and control in projectible kinds](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/not-every-stable-cluster-is-homeostatic/paper.md): A diagnostic ladder for distinguishing stable profiles, network order, maintenance, and corrective control in projectible kinds. Status: Preprint. Canonical record: https://philarchive.org/rec/REYNES
- [Effective without warrant: Causal-normative networks and the social life of status](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/effective-without-warrant/paper.md): A causal-normative network account of how social status can be effective without being warranted. Status: Under review at Journal of Social Ontology. Canonical record: https://philarchive.org/rec/REYEWW
- [What do we mean by language? A pluralist map for the language sciences](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/what-do-we-mean-by-language/paper.md): A pluralist map of the main senses of language used across the language sciences. Status: Under review at Language Sciences. Canonical record: https://philarchive.org/rec/REYWDW
- [English determinatives as nouns](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/english-determinatives-as-nouns/paper.md): An argument that English determinatives occupy the noun category, with consequences for category diagnostics. Status: Under review at English Language and Linguistics. Canonical record: https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/009939
- [What English interjections let us predict: Stable causal-pragmatic clustering and path dependence](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/english-interjections/paper.md): A theoretical-pragmatics account of what categorizing an English form as an interjection lets speakers, hearers, and analysts predict. Status: Under review at Journal of Pragmatics. Canonical record: https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/009852
- [Difference-in-differences for corpus linguistics: Causal inference, corpus composition, and linguistic change after shocks](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/difference-in-differences-for-corpus-linguistics/paper.md): A corpus-methods account of when before/after corpus data can support causal claims about linguistic change after shocks. Status: Preprint. Canonical record: https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/010080
- [Expert Grammaticality Judges as Evaluators, Not Participants: Grammaticality Judgments, Rater Roles, and Research Ethics Review](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/expert-grammaticality-judges/paper.md): A role-classification argument that expert grammaticality judges are participants when studied as people but evaluators when their expertise assesses linguistic materials. Status: Under review at Canadian Journal of Linguistics / Revue canadienne de linguistique. Canonical record: https://philarchive.org/rec/REYEGJ
- [Why clause structure is judged like tense and agreement: Public-update operators and grammaticality](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/public-update-operators/paper.md): A coordination account of why some contrasts are judged as grammatical errors while others remain matters of style, stance, or lexical choice. Status: Preprint. Canonical record: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009706
- [LLMs as boundary phenomena: A comment on Nefdt (2026)](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/llms-as-boundary-phenomena/paper.md): A boundary-phenomena treatment of LLMs and the projection purposes behind cognition-like classifications. Status: Preprint. Canonical record: https://philarchive.org/rec/REYLAB
- [Reference as a cluster concept: A reply to Coelho Mollo and Milliere](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/reference-as-cluster-concept/paper.md): A reply arguing that reference and grounding are cluster concepts rather than all-or-nothing properties. Status: Under review at Philosophy and the Mind Sciences. Canonical record: https://philarchive.org/rec/REYRAA-2
- [Varieties as conditioning structure: A homeostatic account of register, dialect, and discourse community](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/varieties-as-conditioning-structure/paper.md): A homeostatic account of register, dialect, and discourse community as conditioning structures for participant expectation. Status: Preprint. Canonical record: https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/009872
- [Naturalizing typological kinds: Comparanda, mechanisms, and measurement](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/naturalizing-typological-kinds/paper.md): A framework for testing when comparative concepts identify projectible typological kinds rather than analyst labels. Status: Preprint. Canonical record: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009461
- [The homeostatic maintenance of English countability: Bidirectional inference and the stability of grammatical clusters](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/english-countability/paper.md): A bidirectional-inference account of why English countability forms a stable but non-essentialist grammatical cluster. Status: Under review at Linguistics. Canonical record: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009537
- [Definiteness and Deitality in English: A Projectibility-First Account](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/definiteness-and-deitality/paper.md): A projectibility-first account distinguishing semantic definiteness from structural deitality in English. Status: Under review at Journal of Linguistics. Canonical record: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009369
- [Language as a stack of homeostatic property-cluster kinds: From phonemes to constructions](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/language-as-hpc-stack/paper.md): A stack model of linguistic kinds from phonemes to constructions, with empirical case studies across levels. Status: Preprint. Canonical record: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17354363
- [Measuring Stable Diagnostic Ambiguity: A Quantitative Workflow for Small-n Grammatical Boundary Phenomena](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/how-to-study-boundary-phenomena/paper.md): A quantitative workflow for measuring stable diagnostic ambiguity in small-n grammatical boundary phenomena. Status: Under review at Journal of Quantitative Linguistics. Canonical record: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009294

## Project Pages

- [Adversarial Pragmatics for AI Safety Evaluation: Adjudication app](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/adversarial-pragmatics-for-ai-safety-evaluation/judgment-protocol.html): The same browser review app used for the 54-row local seed-pilot adjudication.


## Human-Facing Pages

- [Publications](https://brettreynolds.ca/publications.html): Full publication list.
- [Essays](https://brettreynolds.ca/essays.html): Human-facing essays and talks.
- [Why I Work This Way](https://brettreynolds.ca/why-i-work-this-way.html): An essay on speed, projectibility-first research, and agentic Codex/Claude Code-style systems as workspace infrastructure for science and philosophy.
- [CGEL correctives and extensions](https://brettreynolds.ca/cgel-correctives.html): Thematic cluster of CGEL corrections, extensions, and related category/function work.
- [Machine-readable papers](https://brettreynolds.ca/papers/): Index of Markdown mirrors and BibTeX records.
- [Public OKF export](https://brettreynolds.ca/okf/): Public Open Knowledge Format bundle for selected research-project context.
- [Public OKF bundle index](https://brettreynolds.ca/okf/bundle/index.md): Raw OKF Markdown/YAML bundle index.
- [CV](https://brettreynolds.ca/cv.pdf): Current CV as PDF.

## Use Notes

The Markdown files are author-manuscript mirrors for accessibility, search, and machine readability. The OKF files are public-safe project-context exports. Prefer the linked canonical record for citation when a DOI, PhilArchive, LingBuzz, arXiv, Zenodo, or publisher page is available.