Teaching

I regularly teach the following courses, mostly in alternate years (check details on the Department of Linguistics website):

Freshman Seminar 34x. Language and Prehistory.
An introduction to the methods of historical linguistics, followed by an exploration of the ways language can be used, and misused, as a tool for investigating the distant past.

Linguistics 107. Introduction to Indo-European.
An introduction to the historical study of the Indo-European languages, using the comparative method to arrive at a picture of the parent language of the family, Proto-Indo-European.

Linguistics 118. Historical and Comparative Linguistics.
An introduction to diachronic linguistics at the graduate level. Theory of language change: sound change and analogy, syntactic and semantic change, change in progress. The comparative method: proving genetic relationship, reconstruction, and subgrouping.

Linguistics 123. Intermediate Indo-European.
Designed as a sequel to Linguistics 122. A detailed overview of Indo-European comparative grammar, with emphasis on recent developments and discoveries.

In addition, every year I also teach at least one of:

Linguistics 220ar. Advanced Indo-European.
Linguistics 221r. Workshop in Indo-European.
These are “topics” courses whose focus — often a language or language area — varies from year to year. Recent topics have included Tocharian, Balto-Slavic, the Italo-Celtic question, and the Greek and Indo-Iranian verb.