Jessica Coon is a professor of linguistics at McGill University and Canada Research Chair in syntax and indigenous languages. ^[1] She was the linguistics expert consultant for the 2016 film Arrival. ^{[2] [3]}

Coon works on ergativity, split ergativity, case and agreement, nominalization, field methodology, and collaborative language work in Ch'ol and Chuj (Mayan) and Mi'gmaq (Algonquian). ^[4]

Coon received her PhD from  MIT in 2010 with a dissertation on aspect-based split ergativity, with a focus on the Ch'ol (Mayan) language, and cross-linguistic extensions. ^[5]

Coon received her BA in linguistics-anthropology from Reed College in May 2004. ^[6]

Coon teaches linguistics to both graduate and undergraduate students at McGill University. ^[7]

In 2011, she began collaborating with language teachers in the Mi’gmaq Listuguj community, in order to document, research, and develop teaching materials for Mi’gmaq, a First Nations language of Quebec. ^[8]

Coon was consulted during the finalization of the script for Denis Villeneuve's Arrival for her linguistics expertise. ^[9] She wrote a piece for the Museum of the Moving Image on fieldwork and alien grammars, following her work on Arrival. ^[10]

Since 2018, Coon has led a National Geographic project "to record, transcribe, and translate narratives across different dialects of Ch'ol." ^[11]

• Coon, Jessica and Lauren Clemens (2018). 'Deriving verb-initial word order in Mayan.' Language, 94,2: 237–280.
• Coon, Jessica (2017). Ch’ol. The Mayan Languages, eds. Judith Aissen, Nora England, and Roberto Zavala. London: Routledge. ^[12]
• Coon, Jessica, Pedro Mateo Pedro, and Omer Preminger (2014). 'The role of case in A-bar extraction asymmetries: Evidence from Mayan.' Linguistic Variarion, 14,2: 179–242.
• Coon, Jessica (2013). Aspects of Split Ergativity. New York: Oxford University Press. ^[13]

• Academic homepage
• Jessica Coon publications indexed by Google Scholar