Work Life

I wrote a senior thesis on the phonology of Old Irish and went to the University of Texas for doctoral work, expecting to concentrate in historical phonology. When I got to Austin, however, I got caught up in the excitement of the early years of Montague semantics (despite a serious deficiency in relevant training), working closely with Stanley Peters, with Lauri Karttunen, and with Bill Ladusaw, who was also a student there at the time. Ever since, I have had a strong interest in issues at the syntax semantics interface and in the strands of semantic research that have grown out of Montague's program, an interest reflected, for instance, in the NSF project on Existential sentences on which I was engaged along with Sandy Chung.

My thesis supervisor at Austin, though, was the late Lee Baker, who worked, for the most part, in pure syntax, and that is where my intellectual heart has mostly been ever since.

My goals in the broadest sense have been to meld the descriptive care and attention to detail to be found in the best philological work with the intellectual daring to be found in the best generative work. My long term commitment is to work on the Irish language, trying to make the facts of Irish shed light on the general theory of language, and reciprocally, to have the theory shed light on the facts of Irish. Some general reflections on that enterprise can be found here. I also have a long-term commitment to research on non-standard varieties of English.

Since I work on Irish, I am necessarily and sadly interested in issues of language-death, language-extinction, and language-revival, and I have published a little in that area.

For the first ten years of my career, I worked in the Department of Irish at University College Dublin, where (in order to teach it and to teach in it), I had the great good fortune of having to immerse myself in the scholarship of the language. In that period I also held visiting appointments at MIT and at UC San Diego. I have worked at UC Santa Cruz since the autumn of 1988, after spending a year as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.