Distinguished Research Professor After majoring as an undergraduate in English and minoring in classics and math, I went to Yale to study linguistics and more or less stumbled into one of the leading centers of Indo-European Linguistics in the world. Since I had always had latent interests in this area, based upon my classical studies, I began to take courses with Warren Cowgill on general Indo-European and with Stanley Insler on Sanskrit. I wrote my dissertation on the particle u in the Rigveda, which launched my career as a scholar of Indo-European syntax and discourse structure. Most of my work has been on the language of the Rigveda, especially clausal connection, but I have also written on conjunction in Old Persian and Greek. A second area of interest is the comparative syntax of those old Indo-European languages whose primary or very early texts are translations of the Greek Gospels: Gothic, Classical Armenian, and Old Church Slavic. I have written monographic treatments of personal deixis and indefinite pronouns and polarity in Classical Armenian as well as conjunction and the lexical semantics of preverbs in Gothic. Since 1998 I have been involved in a project studying stylistic repetition in the Rigveda. I consider this an extension of my earlier studies. My approach to Indo-European studies is heavily philological. My first impulse on any research project is to start with a text, mining it for whatever phenomenon I am interested in at the time. Over the past year I have become deeply involved in the editorship of the de Gruyter Handbook of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics, a massive project with 128 chapters and around 120 different authors. It will be the most extensive presentation of the field in nearly 100 years. I view this as a way to give something back to the field which has so engaged my energies over the past 45 years. My current research goals are: 1) Editorship of the de Gruyter Handbook of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics 2) Stylistic Repetition in the Rigveda (a book-length study) 3) Interstanzaic Repetition in the Rigveda (a monograph) 4) Studies in the Comparative Syntax of the Greek, Gothic, Classical Armenian, and Old Church Slavic Gospels Research Areas of Interest: Historical Linguistics Specific Research Areas: Historical linguistics, Indo-European syntax and discourse structure Courses Taught Courses Taught: LING(CLAS) 4610/6610 LING(CLAS) 4620/6620 LING (CLAS) 4211/6211 LING 4690/6690 LING 4920/6920 LING 4900/6900 LING 4904/6904 GREK(LATN)(LING) 4150/6150 GRMN(LING) 8320 LING 8680
