Personal Interests

An ardent consumer of international cuisines and international film productions; of European and Japanese fiction; of Western architecture and its history, of jazz, jazz history and French chanson.

The less adventurous forms of international travel and relaxation (apéritifs in famous cafes; no mountain climbing or white water rafting, please).

World political, social and religious history; recent and current international political conflict.

The structure, grammar, history and lexicons of Romance and Germanic languages.

Road maps, especially old ones!

The History of the American Indians in the United States. On this topic I have given the following talk on my Indian Reservation childhood: "A White Boy on the Rosebud", Himeji University, Himeji, Japan, December, 2003.

Personal History

Indian Reservations in the Dakotas and Wyoming, 1940s.

Middleton, Wisconsin, 1950-1962.

Lawrence, Kansas, 1962-1964.

Annapolis, Maryland, 1964-1965.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1965-1968, 1984 (spring).

Champaign, Illinois, 1968-1969.

Paris, France, 1969-1970; 1972 (autumn); 1977; 1989 (spring and summer).

Los Angeles, California, 1970-1979.

London, England, 1979 (second half); 2000-….

Princeton, New Jersey, 1973-1974.

Seattle, Washington, 1980-1991.

Berkeley, California, 1982 (winter).

San Francisco, California, 1985-1986.

Aix-en-Provence, France, 1987 (spring and summer).

Tilburg, Netherlands, 1992 (winter, spring, summer).

Durham, England, 1992-1999.

Makuhari, Japan, 1994-1996 (springs).

Wassenaar, Netherlands, 1997 (spring).

Nishinomiya, Japan, 2000-2007.

Vienna, Austria, 2007 (autumn).

Bilbao and Vitoria, Basque Country 2008.

AUTHOR'S SHORT ACADEMIC BIOGRAPHY

My father Joseph was a highway engineer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the American West, and my mother Margaret (Embley) was a primary school teacher. I attended high school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, received a BA in mathematics from Loras College, Dubuque, Iowa and an MA in mathematics at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas.

After a year of teaching at the U.S. Naval Academy, I studied for the PhD in linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (awarded 1970), with Noam Chomsky as my highly encouraging supervisor, who proposed me for a final fellowship year at the newly inaugurated University of Illinois Center for Advanced Study.

At the kind invitation of Nicolas Ruwet, my intermittent European career began at the Université de Paris VIII (Vincennes) in 1969-1970, after which my first permanent position started at the University of California at Los Angeles (1970-1979). My son Peter was born in Hollywood in 1973. While still a novice at the joys of fatherhood, I lectured at Princeton University (1973-1974), invited by William Moulton, and at the Université de Paris VII (1976-1977), invited by Jean-Claude Milner. A Guggenheim Fellowship permitted extending this stay in Paris. I also gave a summer school course at the International Christian University in Japan, invited by Kazuko Inoue. The decade closed with a self-granted half-year respite from academia in London.

A second permanent position, including five years as chair, was at the University of Washington (1980-1991). Research and teaching leaves were spent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1984), the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1985-1986), the Université de Provence (1987) and the Université de Paris VIII (1989). These latter two stays were arranged by José Deulofeu and Alain Rouveret. I was also co-director of the Dubrovnik summer school with Rastko Mocnik (1987) and made frequent academic visits to the Netherlands. The last four Seattle years coincided with experiencing high school a second and more exciting time.

Expatriation began in earnest with a teaching fellowship organized by Henk van Riemsdijk at Tilburg University (1992), followed by taking up the Chair of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Durham in 1992. During this period, I was active in van Riemsdijk's European Science Foundation Eurotyp Group 8 and visiting professor at Kanda University of International Studies from 1994 through 1996, again invited by Kazuko Inoue. After fellowships at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Science in 1997 and at Nagoya's Nanzan University in 1998 (sponsored by the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science with Mamoru Saito as host), I accepted in 2000 a professorship at Shoin Kobe University's new graduate school, organized by Takao Gunji and Taisuke Nishigauchi.

Since then I have accepted Visiting Professorships for one semester at the University of Vienna and for the calendar year 2008 at the University of the Basque Country.