Research Interests
- General Linguistic Theory: Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics; Historical Linguistics; and the History of Linguistics.
- Cognitive Science of Language: the nature of linguistic knowledge and its relation to the functional architecture of the mind/brain; the relations between communicative abilities in non-human animals and human natural language. I'm also a charter member of Project Steve.
- Languages: Scandinavian (Icelandic, Faroese); Romance (French, Franco-Provençal patois, Rumantsch); Celtic (Breton); Caucasian languages (Georgian, Abkhaz); American Indian languages (Wakashan [Kwakw'ala], Muskogean, Algonquian). I am currently conducting research on the Surmiran form of Rumantsch under a Research Grant from the National Science Foundation (BCS-0418410).
Lingua longa, vita brevis
I've spent a good deal of my time over a number of years developing a view of word structure known as A-Morphous Morphology, which has a variety of implications for several areas of phonology and morphosyntax. It also leads to a theory of clitics (considered to be the analog at the phrase level of affixes and other morphology within words), on which my research was supported for several years by the National Science foundation (grants SBR 95-14682 and BCS 98-76456). A book presenting this theory appeared in the Fall of 2005.
Be kind to bunnies
