Education & Professional History
University of Massachusetts-Amherst, PhD
I was born in Chicago in 1952. My family moved to Clarendon Hills, IL when I was 10. I attended a Catholic grade school, Hinsdale Central High School, and the University of Notre Dame, where I majored in English Literature. I was the first person in my family to have the opportunity to go to college.
My Ph.D. in Linguistics is from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. My dissertation Structure Building Operations and Word Order was directed by Barbara Partee and subsequently published by Garland Press (1981).
Early in my career I held a number of visiting positions, at the University of New Hampshire, Reed College, and Hampshire College. I won a Fulbright to spend a year at the Rijksunversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands, and then spent half a year at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. While I was in The Netherlands, I met my wife Angelique Dietz. We were married in Amsterdam in 1983 and spent the next year teaching at Nankai University in Tianjin, China.
I returned to the States, teaching for one year at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and one year at the University of Arizona, Tucson. In 1986 I was hired into a tenure track position at Carleton, where I was asked to build a program in linguistics. (See “Carleton Linguistics 1990 to 2020” in my collected writings.)
Besides building the Linguistics Program, I had many duties at the College, including Student Fellowships Advisor, Faculty Athletics Representative, Director of Summer Programs for students from Chuo and Doshisha Universities in Japan, and various ad hoc committees. I also was elected by the faculty to the Faculty Affairs Committee and the Education and Curriculum Committee. I also served two terms on the Faculty Personnel Committee.
While at Carleton I designed and led the OCS Kyoto Program. I was a visiting faculty member at Chuo University and Keio University in Tokyo, and Doshisha University in Kyoto. (See “Linguistics and Culture in Japan” in my collected writings.) I also directed the Dakota Language Project, for which I wrote many grants, both internal and external.
Angelique and I have two daughters, Marieke (b. 1988) and Nora (b. 1992). They are married and we have two grandchildren, Flynn (b. 2023) and Mariana (b. 2024). We all live in Fort Collins, Colorado.
At Carleton since 2023.
