Education
- PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1967.
- MA, University of Pennsylvania, 1964.
- BA, Yale University, 1960.
Research Interests
Semantax – an interfield that sees syntax and semantics as inseparably interpenetrating; linguistic analysis of poetry
My primary areas of research are in semantax – an interfield that sees syntax and semantics as inseparably interpenetrating – and poetics – the study of verbal art with the help of detailed linguistic analyses of texts. In the former area, for the past forty-nine years, I have been collecting squibs – short notes about phonological, morphological or semantactic phenomena which defy analysis in current theoretical frameworks.
In addition, John Goldsmith, of the University of Chicago, and I are building a web-based archive of videos of senior linguists: Lives in Linguistics – a kind of oral history project. While the archive is small at present, our hope is that it may inspire other linguists around the world to assemble a visual record of all of our linguistic forbears.