Research

I’m a historical linguist, with an interest in all aspects of language change. More specifically, though, I’m an Indo-Europeanist — a specialist in the Indo-European (IE) family and the development of the early IE languages from their reconstructed parent, Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Some of the particular problems and projects I’m working on, or have recently worked on, are described below.

The PIE verbal system

Starting from an idea I had in the late 1970’s, I’ve developed a model of the PIE verbal system that tries to account for the discrepancies between the “classical” picture of the PIE verb and the surprisingly aberrant facts of Hittite and Anatolian. A milestone along the way was my 2003 book, Hittite and the Indo-European Verb (HIEV), which (inter alia) documents the case for a PIE “h₂e-conjugation” alongside the familiar “mi-conjugation.” Although the “h₂e-conjugation theory” has given rise to a certain amount of controversy, I have on the whole been gratified with its reception. The project is ongoing, with new findings constantly leading to modifications and refinements of the picture presented in HIEV.

Balto-Slavic accentuation

Following the publication of HIEV, I made an extended professional detour into studying the historical origins of the Baltic and Slavic accent and intonation systems. Balto-Slavic accentology is a complex and contentious field, largely neglected by mainstream Indo-Europeanists. My interest in the topic grew out of my need to use Lithuanian and Slavic accentual evidence in my work on the PIE verb. Despite a century of impressive scholarship on accentual developments within Baltic and Slavic, there is remarkably little agreement on how the Balto-Slavic system as a whole, which differs profoundly from that of PIE, came into being. My 2017 book, The Prehistory of the Balto-Slavic Accent, tries to reconstruct this history.

Problems in the individual languages

Since the purpose of reconstructing a parent language is to illuminate the history of its descendants, part of my work is devoted to shedding light on unexplained facts in the IE daughter languages. I am often drawn to “classic” problems, such as the origin of the Germanic weak preterite, the Old Irish f-future, and the Latin gerund and gerundive in -nd-. I have written extensively on the representation of “ē-statives” around the family (the topic of my 1978 monograph, Stative and Middle in Indo-European), and on the sigmatic verb forms of Italic, Celtic, Hittite, and Tocharian. In recent years I have found it particularly rewarding to work on Tocharian, which I find richer in unsolved-but-solvable problems than any other branch of the family.