Rachel Watson completed a BA Linguistics, MA Language Documentation and Description and PhD Field Linguistics all at SOAS. Her PhD research involved a first description of Kujireray, a Joola language of southern Senegal, as well as an analysis of the nominal classification system and verbal nouns in this language using a Cognitive Linguistics framework.

Rachel Watson is a post-doctoral fellow on the Crossroads project. She has been carrying out research on Kujireray – one of the Crossroads languages – since 2011, and recently submitted her doctoral thesis “Nominal Classification and Verbal Nouns in Kujireray” which comprised a first description of this language as well as an analysis of its noun class system in both the nominal and verbal domains.

Within the project, Rachel is responsible for the continued development of the Kujireray corpus and analysis of the language. She is continuing her research on nominal classification contributing to a comparative study of the complex noun class systems of Casamance languages in collaboration with other team members. This study aims to further illuminate the effects of contact on the organization of these systems. In addition, she provides technical training and support for doctoral students and transcribers.

Research Interests include Noun classification, Cognitive Linguistics, language documentation and description, Joola languages, language contact, multilingualism, morphology.