About The Speaker

I am currently a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Delaware, specializing in phonology, and most things that relate to it, including interfaces with other components of grammar, phonetics, language acquisition. Prior to joining the Linguistics Department at UD, I taught linguistics at SUNY Buffalo as a visiting professor; before that, at several Universities in Italy (Venice, Bergamo, Rome); and before that at the Universities of Amsterdam and Nijmegen, in the Netherlands. All of this was preceded by my earning degrees in Linguistics: BA at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; MA and PhD at Stanford University.

The general theoretical area that has kept me occupied throughout my career is the interaction of phonology with other aspects of grammar – from my dissertation on syllables and raddoppiamento sintattico in Italian, through the development of Prosodic Phonology (1986/2007) with Marina Nespor, and the continued evolution of this theory.  The experimental work focuses on the acoustic properties of prosody.  To this end, I direct the Prosodic Typologies Lab (previously Stress Typology Lab), where we are conducting a cross-linguistic investigation of the acoustic properties of prominence (stress and focus).