My interest is in languages, linguistic theory and the interaction of grammar with other cognitive domains. But one can't do everything, so my actual research activities have tended to meander over the years. My doctoral dissertation (1982, UCLA) was a cross-linguistic study of distributive numerals, and during the eighties the main focus of my research was on quantification and the ways in which it is expressed in typologically diverse languages. Some of the languages I worked on in that period included Maricopa, Georgian, Turkish, Hebrew, Tagalog and Japanese. At the same time, I was also engaged in constructing a theory of prosody, a formal characterization of the human 'sense of rhythm', as manifest in language, both ordinary and poetic, and in music -- an endeavor which led me to the study of verse forms such as cheers, nursery rhymes, vendor cries, and various canonical meters such as the medieval Judaeo-Islamic quantitative meters, and classical English Iambic Pentameter. Concurrently with these activities, I found myself developing an areal interest in the languages of Southeast Asia, and after numerous trips, I moved to that part of the world in 1992. While living in Southeast Asia, my interests turned more and more to the nuts and bolts of linguistic description, working with the myriad undescribed or underdescribed languages of that region, primarily the various colloquial dialects of Malay / Indonesian, but in addition the Southern Min dialects of Chinese, and the local varieties of English. During the early nineties I also grew closer to the European community of typologists, thanks to my participation in the Noun Phrase group of the EUROTYP project.
At present, my main research interest is in the Riau dialect of Indonesian: the more I work on this language, the more "exotic" it seems to me to become, and the more it leads me towards the belief that languages may differ from one another to a much greater extent than is commonly assumed. I am now beginning work on a book which, on the one hand, will provide an easy and accessible description of Riau Indonesian, and at the same time will lay the foundations for a theory of universal grammar that is non-Eurocentric in orientation, taking the Riau dialect of Indonesian (rather than Latin or English) as its point of departure. A recent and new interest of mine is in the discovery and description of various endangered languages that are spoken in the remote jungle areas of east central Sumatra. I am currently engaged iu a number of collaborative projects with other researchers at the Max Planck Institute: investigating the prehistory of Sumatra coordinating linguistic and genetic evidence, with Mark Stoneking and Manfred Keyser; coediting the World Atlas of Language Structures, with Bernard Comrie, Matthew Dryer and Martin Haspelmath; and working on the projects of the Jakarta Field Station, with Uri Tadmor and all the other people there.
What do I enjoy most about linguistics? Being out in the field getting data from real live people; sitting in an armchair constructing highly abstract theories; and, above all, bringing the two together to form a single holistic activity.
Research in Riau Province, Indonesia
ISMIL: International Symposia on Malay/Indonesian Linguistics