Jonathan Bobaljik

Professor of Linguistics and Head of Department

Education:Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Research areas:Morphology, Syntax, Endangered Languages, Language Universals

Language areas:Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Germanic, Russian

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CURRENT PROJECTS:

• Universals in Comparative Morphology (MIT Press, 2012) focuses on the morphology that expresses degrees of comparison (comparative, superlative) in a large cross-linguistic sample. The special focus is on suppletion – the most highly irregular derivations (good — better — best). In the book, I argue that there is a surprising amount of systematicity in this domain; that there are virtually exceptionless generalizations that emerge across languages, focusing on five such generalizations as contenders for the status of linguistic universals.
• Audio-Video Documentation of Itelmen (NSF collaboration with D. Koester, U. Alaska, Fairbanks) aims to provide online resources and archival descriptions for the Itelmen language, now spoken natively by fewer than 10 people on Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula.