Biographical Notes (Technology Review, Class Notes, March/April 2025)

I wrote this for the Technology Review, Class Notes. It should appear in the March/April 2025 issue. There are also some pictures to accompany the text. They are pictures of me in the field. But I do not post them here.

I graduated from MIT in 1985 with a degree in mathematics (course 18, building 2). While at MIT, I found out about linguistics (course 24, building 20), and took as many courses as I could. After graduating, I immediately enlisted as a Peace Corps volunteer, and was sent off to Togo, West Africa for two years, teaching math at the Lycée level. These two intensive experiences (MIT undergraduate and Peace Corps Togo) ultimately came together, creating my career path as a linguist doing fieldwork on the syntax of the languages of Africa.

I returned again to MIT for graduate study in linguistics, graduating in 1993 with a thesis titled “Topics in Ewe Syntax” (Ewe being one of the main languages of Togo). After graduating, I got a job as professor of linguistics at Cornell. In 2006, I moved to New York University, where I have worked ever since.

For 28 years, from 1996 until 2024, I carried out an extensive research project investigating the syntax of the Khoisan languages of southern Africa, including South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. Staging frequent expeditions into the field, I have studied seven languages, writing four grammars and one dictionary. The project has yielded over 90,000 high quality audio recordings of words and phrases. I have also brought students into the field, and trained them how to do fieldwork.

The Khoisan languages are the non-Bantu click languages, spoken in the vicinity of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. They are well-known for their complex sound inventories (for example, try pronouncing an alveolar click with a uvular fricative release), but they also have much to teach us about the syntax of human languages.

For example, in Kua, a language of southeastern Botswana, there are 30 different pronouns for subjects alone. These pronouns show distinctions in person (first, second, third), number (singular, plural, dual), gender (masculine, feminine, neutral) and clusivity (inclusive, exclusive). Incredibly, there are twelve different pronouns corresponding to the single English pronoun ‘we’! For example, the Kua pronoun asebe means ‘You and I, who are both female, and nobody else’, which is translated simply as ‘we’ in English.

Studying pronoun systems in different languages gives us a direct window into the kinds of cognitive categories that are represented in the human mind. Understanding these pronominal distinctions and how they are integrated into the grammar of Kua was one of my main research objectives.

My plan now, in the years leading up to retirement, is to return to west Africa to work more on the Ewe language, which was my first linguistic love. I plan to create an interactive dialect map of Ewe that people all over the world can access freely and explore. I will also continue to train students, both African and American, in fieldwork and the scientific study of natural language syntax.