Seth Cable

Seth Cable is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, affiliated with the Department of Linguistics within the College of Humanities & Fine Arts. He holds a PhD from MIT (2007) and an MS in Formal Logic from the University of Amsterdam (2002). Prior to UMass, he was a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia. Cable’s research focuses on Semantics, Syntax, and fieldwork in Na-Dene languages, particularly Tlingit. His work explores topics like modality, distributivity, aspect, and grammatical structure in Tlingit and other languages. He serves as an associate editor for the International Journal of American Linguistics and Journal of Semantics, and contributes to editorial boards of Linguistic Inquiry and Semantics and Pragmatics.

His research highlights include groundbreaking studies on Tlingit’s verbal morphology, tense systems, and the semantics of habituality. Publications span major journals like Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and Language, alongside monographs such as The Grammar of Q (2010). Awards include the 2012 Linguistic Society of America Early Career Award.

Cable teaches advanced linguistics courses including Formal Semantics, Graduate Field Methods, and Semantics of Tense and Aspect. His fieldwork emphasizes documentation and theoretical analysis of under-studied languages. Recent work examines stative marking in Tlingit and habituality in cross-linguistic frameworks.