My big interest is to try to discover how the various formal and functional dimensions of grammar cooperate and interact to produce the richness of human language. In the process of studying the relation of pragmatics to semantics during the first fifteen years of my life as a linguist, and the relation between morphology and syntax for the next fifteen years, I have become convinced that human beings bring a number of simultaneous abilities to bear on the problem of language. Since 1985 I have been trying to construct a model of grammar (Autolexical Syntax) in which each grammatical dimension, whether formal or functional, is described by an autonomous mini-grammar that provides representations for only one encapsulated aspect of linguistic organization. Lately the number of such dimensions has grown considerably and each has become considerably simpler. They are tending in the direction of constraints rather than components and the theory is coming to resemble Optimality Theory in its basic architecture.

I also have two abiding language interests, namely the natural class of languages comprising West Greenlandic Inuit and Yiddish. I have been working for a number of years on a rather full grammar of West Greenlandic done in the framework of Autolexical Syntax. I have also written a few things on Yiddish grammar from this point of view. I am also working on an uncharacteristically philological project that attempts to get at the somewhat mysterious West Yiddish, now virtually extinct, that the Jews of German-speaking Europe presumably spoke by examining the parodical and frequently anti-Semitic plays of a genre called Judenpossen. These plays, the German equivalent of minstrel shows, caricature the speech of Jews and shed some light on what West Yiddish might have been like.

Fuller list of publications and work in progress
Return to the Linguistics Home Page
Return to the Linguistics Faculty Listing

 Page created July 17, 1997.
Last updated March 3, 2007.