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.

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. 

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.

Audio Interview: Fieldwork in My Career (April 3, 2026)

Abstract: This is an interview that I gave on fieldwork in my career. The interviewer is Essivi Collins, my daugther. The venue was a stroll on the busy streets of New York City. We were walking from Washington Square Village to the Hudson, and then we turned right and walked up the Hudson.

Interview