Andrew Garrett
Professor

Indo-European languages, historical linguistics, language change, Yurok and other California Indian languages
Ph.D., Linguistics, Harvard University, 1990

Groups: Language & Historical Context, Fieldwork & Language Documentation

Contact information

Email: garrett@berkeley.edu
Office phone: (510) 643-7524
Fax: (510) 643-5688

Office hours: M 3-4, W 1-2

Web site: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~garrett

Mailing address:
1203 Dwinelle #2650
Berkeley, CA 94720-2650

Personal statement

I am a historical linguist interested in language change (in phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics), patterns of language diversification, and methods of reconstruction. In my historical research I seek to reintegrate the study of language change with linguistic theory and typology, and in my Americanist work to bring philological and field work together to develop a picture of the linguistic ecology of California and the west coast. I work on Yurok (a language of northwestern California) and on early Indo-European languages, especially Greek, Latin, and languages belonging to the Anatolian branch (such as Hittite and Lycian); I have also worked on the history and (British) dialects of English, on the Austronesian languages Leti, Ponapean, and Rotuman, and on Rumsen (an Ohlone language of the San Francisco Bay Area).

Selected publications

"Paradigmatic uniformity and markedness", in Explaining linguistic universals: Historical convergence and universal grammar, ed. by Jeff Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 125-143

"The rise and fall of l-sandhi in California Algic" (with Juliette Blevins), International Journal of American Linguistics 73 (2007) 72-93

"Convergence in the formation of Indo-European subgroups: Phylogeny and chronology", in Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, ed. by Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2006), pp. 139-151

Preliminary Yurok dictionary (compiled with Juliette Blevins and Lisa Conathan; Berkeley: Yurok Language Project, Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley, 2005)

"The evolution of metathesis" (with Juliette Blevins), in Phonetically-based phonology, ed. by Bruce Hayes, Robert Kirchner, and Donca Steriade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 117-156

"Reduplication and infixation in Yurok: Morphology, semantics, and diachrony", International Journal of American Linguistics 67 (2001) 264-312

"On the origin of auxiliary do", English Language and Linguistics 2 (1998) 283-330