Monday, April 20, 2026

Preliminary Book Proposal: Morphology as Syntax, volumes 1 and 2

 Preliminary Proposal: Morphology as Syntax, Volumes 1 and 2.

Abstract: The proposal is for a two-volume set dedicated to defining and exploring Morphology as Syntax, a new theory about the relationship between morphology and syntax.

Sunday, April 12, 2026

My Wegovy Journey

I am in general very slow to start worrying about my health. I tend to think that the medical establishment is a bunch of money hungry hustlers, prone to administering expensive procedures and to robotically writing out prescriptions in order to quickly solve problems. I try to stay away from them as much as possible.

Thursday, April 9, 2026

The Syntax of Verb Focus in Kabiye

Abstract: This paper explores the syntax of verb focus in Kabiye, a Gur language spoken in Togo.

Collins, Chris and Komlan Essizewa. 2007. Syntax of Verb Focus in Kabiye. In Doris L. Payne and Jaime Peña (eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, 191-203. Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA. 

The Syntax of Verb Focus in Kabiye




Syntactic Fieldwork for a Field Methods Course

In this blog post, I will lay out some general guidelines on how to elicit syntactic information in a Field Methods course. 

Worksheet for Syntactic Fieldwork

The purpose of this blog post is to present a general template for a syntactic fieldwork session. I will not talk specifically about syntactic elicitation, or methodology or particular constructions that you could investigate. 

Wednesday, April 8, 2026

Blog Posts on ELAN

I post here a series of introductory blog posts on the use of ELAN in fieldwork. 

ELAN for Field Methods

The purpose of this blog post is to give the simplest possible instructions for setting up an ELAN project. They are based on a Field Methods course taught at NYU on Setswana, a language of southern Africa. Replace “Setswana” with the name of the language you are studying.