David J Beck

Research

Homepage

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

The study of the shapes of words, the processes used to form them, and the meanings expressed by words and their parts. Focus on the description of morphological systems and their underlying organization. Prerequisites: LING 101, LING 204, and LING 310.

Browse more courses taught by David J Beck