Research
Coming from a background of comparative and historical Romance linguistics, I pursue research interests across a range of languages and their geolinguistic varieties, primarily for Spanish, Italian and French, but also encompassing Catalan, Portuguese and Romanian as well as Latin. After an earlier period devoted to phonology and morphology, my recent focus has been on morphosyntax and broader syntactic questions in the development of the Romance languages., in particular concerning the many theoretical and descriptive problems posed by the development of Romance clitic elements.1970-1988 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Intrigued by the formal linguistic theory of the Sixties, I spent a post-doctoral year at the Univ. of California, San Diego, and then obtained first a faculty position at the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, with connections to Linguistics, eventually completing the career path to full professor. My interests bridge the focal points of linguistic formalism and language-oriented philological perspective. The conjunction of new and old-style Romance linguistics, of historical concerns and formal synchrony, proved to be more challenging than imagined due to the tension created by the richness of historical and dialectal data as well as the increasing formality of the theoretical stance in the generative tradition. The 1987 book on the initial development of Romance clitic pronouns (The Development of Unstressed Object Pronouns in the Romance Languages. From Latin to Old Romance, Berlin, Mouton) is the result of this internal debate. Its composition was crucially supported by an NEH fellowship for 1983/84 in combination with a sabbatical year from the University of Illinois. The monograph reconstructs the rather weak traces of a nascent Romance clitic pronoun system through the study of Popular, Late, and Medieval Latin texts, establishing a progressive presence of this phenomenon frequently hidden in superimposed codes of written expression. Clitics are seen as changing organically over long periods of time, but in the end they preferentially appear in a small set of prototypical forms.One early article on the order and order change of clitic elements across the Romania (1974) stands out from several publications on phonology and morphology (cf. e.g. the 1972 statement on Italian verb paradigms, the 1975 paper on Italian first plural verb forms, the 1979 reanalysis of Latin to Romance stress shifts, and later on the 1989.1 essay on metathesis). My main effort started to shift toward morphosyntax for which the 1981 paper on complementizer deletion in Italian represents a turning point. The theoretical stance of all of these writings is a mitigated generative approach intent on preserving the insights of traditional positions and analyses while using the power of formal description.
1988 - present at the Ohio State University
The change to The Ohio State University and its newly created department of Spanish and Portuguese coincided with a more definite turn toward historical syntax, mainly of Spanish. In the early Nineties my publications moved toward a stricter formal framework for questions of syntactic change in the clitic system (e.g. two articles on medieval clitic linearization in 1991 and 1992), extending to the pro-drop question and its historical background (e.g. 1993) as well as the verb position (1989) and second position phenomena (1996). The renewed reliance on formal guidance again ran into the critical challenge of how historical syntax was possible given the postulates of formal linguistics. After a pragmatic attempt at solving the question through the programmatic use of an electronic surrogate for the irreplaceable native speaker (a 1991 article on Medieval Spanish text files), I started to look more systematically for a more broadly supported solution to the old quandary.With the research award (Forschungspreis) from the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation I spent a year at the Albrecht-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (Germany) under the auspices of Prof. Wolfgang Raible and the Romanisches Seminar. This year 1994/95 became crucial for my current linguistic thinking. The freedom to pursue my linguistic interests in contact with the distinctive text orientation practiced there engendered a kind of rational "conversion" away from the purely formal pole of the field toward a more cognitive approach. The change of perspective now finds its expression in my 2006 book The Power of Analogy. An Essay on Historical Linguistics (Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin). Here I develop the immanent approach, i.e., the speaker/hearer's perspective of minimal computational effort aimed at assuring functionality of communication in a given context. This is coupled with the replacement of formal generalization with a locally limited and largely unpredictable, yet pervasive analogy. Dispensing also with a strict dichotomy of synchrony vs. diachrony, the result is a simplified view of language largely as an outgrowth of cognitive capacities not special to language. suggesting a holistic conceptualization of language as a psychological, social, historical, and only to a moderate part formal phenomenon of human capacity and activity.
Between 1996 and 2004 my research has been affected by a heavy commitment of time to administration as department chair. My newest efforts in research follow the directions laid down in the 2006 Essay, exploring specific aspects of analogical developments in morphology (e.g. 2003 and 2006) and once in a broad investigation of the history of Spanish clitic syntax (e.g. 2006). The use of representative textual data bases has become central to the efforts at securing the theoretical claims through more than anecdotal evidence, revealing new perspectives on the chronological development and regional differentiation in the otherwise well-known phenomena under investigation.
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