Historical and Areal Linguistics

Linguistic studies of Yiddish span several centuries and incorporate a wide range of research questions and methodologies, from philological analyses of Old Yiddish texts to generative approaches to particular grammatical constructions. The historical development of the language has undoubtedly been, and continues to be, the most hotly debated research topic in Yiddish linguistics. However, other productive areas of inquiry have included structural analysis (e.g., syntax, semantics, and phonology), dialectology and other fields of sociolinguistics (e.g., language contact and interspeaker...

The following is a piece that I wrote far back in 2008 as I was finishing my dissertation and starting up as an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley. I was invited to write it as one of a number of commentaries for a new edition of Max Schmidt's 1917 work "Die Aruaken. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Kulturverbreitung" [The Arawak: A Contribution to the Problem of Cultural Dissemination]. The volume ended up never being published, but over the years a number of people have asked me for this piece and it has been cited in a number of works on Arawakan history and ethnography. I've decided to make...

Guébie, a Kru language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire, is currently doubly classified within Eastern Kru according to Ethnologue (Lewis et al. 2013). It is listed as a dialect of two distinct subgroups, Bété and Dida. This double classification is clearly problematic, and this paper provides the initial work towards addressing the correct classification of the language. Here I compare the phonological and syntactic properties of Guébie with surrounding Bété and Dida languages in order to determine its relatedness to each subgroup. I conclude that Guébie is more closely related to Vata, a Dida...