Professor of Linguistics (budgeted) and Middle East Studies
retirement scheduled June 2029
Research Interests
- fieldwork and documentation (West Africa, Morocco, Australia, etc.)
- historical and contact linguistics
- functional morphosyntax
- morphophonology (especially ablaut)
- prosody (tone systems, tonosyntax, and intonation)
- lexical semantics (flora-fauna, kinship, action verbs)
- natural species (flora, fauna)
some relevant websites:
(self-)interviews
Dogon project site
youtube channel with interior W African videos
Tsammalex site for African flora-fauna
Deep Blue Documents (deposited pdfs)
Deep Blue Data (deposited media and spreadsheets)
curriculum vitae including publication list
topics of selected courses taught recently at Michigan:
Language and humor (first-year seminar)
Language and history (upper-division undergraduate)
Morphology (various levels)
Cognitive linguistics (upper-division undergraduate)
Language and biology (undergraduate capstone)
With a Tuareg speaker (left) in Timbuktu
