The bulk of my research is based on over ten years of on-location fieldwork: first on Australian languages (1970's), then on Muslim and Jewish vernaculars of Maghrebi Arabic (1980's), and since 1990 on languages of Mali in interior West Africa: Tamashek (Tuareg, Berber family), five Songhay languages, and beginning in 2004 a number of Dogon languages including Jamsay. I am a generalist with special interests in lexicography, synchronic and historical morphology, and prosody (including tonology). Examples of theoretically interesting phenomena in my work are bidirectional case-markers inserted between adjacent nonzero subject and object NPs (Songhay), "phonological" modifications of ablaut elements (accent shift, erasure of ablaut lengthening) that apply only within determiner-headed relative clauses (Tamashek), stem-wide tone-dropping limited to particular syntactic positions such as internal head of relative (Dogon), obligatory "intonational" falling terminal pitch patterns in both coordinands of NP conjuctions or before a universal quantifier (Dogon), and radical nonconfigurationality and its implications for the lexicon (Nunggubuyu). I am not a big fan of highly modularized and/or universalizing linguistic models, which are helpless to resolve such issues. Much of my production has been in the form of large-scale language-specific works, typically grammar-text-dictionary trilogies. In addition to my primary linguistic research, I have a long-standing teaching interest in advertising and political rhetoric.
With a Tuareg speaker (left) in Timbuktu