David J Beck

Research

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Upper Necaxa Project

My interests include fieldwork, typology, morphology, communicative/information structure, and American Indigenous languages, particularly Totonacan and Lushootseed (Salishan). My doctoral dissertation, The typology of parts-of-speech systems: The markedness of adjectives, lays the foundations of a theory of lexical classes, which at once accounts for the cross-linguistic markedness of adjectives and shows how parts of speech are a product of the interface between semantic and syntactic structures. My other interests include language contact, grammatical diffusion, and areal typology. I am particularly interested in the dynamics of grammatical diffusion found in a Sprachbund or residual zone, an area where large numbers of languages—frequently genetically unrelated or only distantly related to one another—have co-existed for centuries without wholesale language shift or replacement of local languages by a socio-economically more powerful neighbour.

LING 308 - Morphology

Basic principles of word formation and structure across languages. Prerequisites: LING 101, 204, and 310.

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