[2] During this time he studied under scholars Roman Jakobson and Horace G. Lunt, intellectual giants whose linguistic work and thought he would later expand upon in his own analyses of the Russian language as a system.
[2] Jakobsen reportedly suggested the topic of his dissertation, The Language of the Memoirs of the Princess Natal'ja Dolgorukaja's writings,[2][3] which was later published as a book and has been called a "pioneering document" in the study of autobiography and gender in the Russian context.
[1][5][6] During his lifetime Townsend published widely on topics in Slavic languages and linguistics, authoring nine books and over a hundred scholarly articles in all.
[1] He made several noteworthy contributions to his fields with a critical edition of Princess Dolgorukaya's memoir, monographs on Russian morphology,[7] Spoken Prague Czech,[8] as well as a comparative analysis of the Slavic languages[9] which was translated into German in 2002 and Korean in 2011.
Peers have praised Townsend's brilliant mind and described his striving to employ the insights of linguistic analysis to further enrich and inform language pedagogy.