The Medieval Studies Institute

I am interested in understanding how and why language changes, and particularly in changes in syntactic systems (changes in word order or in relations among parts of sentences). Although observation of contemporary variation and change-in-progress is important to my work, my primary focus is the 1200-year history of written French, a time period that is large enough for us to see the reflection of major upheavals in grammatical patterns. My investigation of syntactic change is couched in terms of contemporary generative syntactic theory, and my most recent research adds a dialectological and cross-linguistic perspective by examining regional variation in Old French and Old Occitan (the language of southern France).