Dr. Broadwell’s primary research agenda focuses on endangered languages, primarily Native American languages of the United States and Mesoamerica. He is interested in the issues of integrating language description and documentation with contemporary work in linguistic theory.

His long-term descriptive commitments have been to grammatical and lexical descriptions of Choctaw, contemporary Zapotec (San Dionisio Ocotepec, Macuiltianguis, and Sierra Juarez varieties), Colonial Valley Zapotec, Copala Triqui, and Timucua, with occasional work on grammatical issues in a number of other languages around the world (Mon, Kaqchikel, Kiche, Turkish, Crow, Creek).

From a theoretic point of view, he has been interested in word order, causative structures, lexical semantics, negation, diachronic syntax, and syntactic typology. In collaboration with colleagues in History, Anthropology, Computer Science, Education, Communication, and Psychology, he has also worked on issues in the interpretation of historical texts, linguistic and archaeology reconstruction, computational sociolinguistics, language in the classroom, and the computational identification of metaphors.