Students in the PhD program typically combine linguistics with a secondary area such as English and American literature, rhetoric and composition, folk lore, or creative writing. Such combinations result in well-balanced degrees that are attractive to many hiring committees. The remaining six hours may be taken as electives inside or outside the department, including a wide variety of courses offered by the Linguistics Area Program. Financial Aid Students admitted to the graduate program are eligible for a variety of fellowships and teaching assistantships. Her research area is generative syntax.
Recent work focuses on grammatical agreement, and word order variation.
A member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he has directed dissertations on medieval English and ancient Greek literature and oral tradition. Under his direction, graduate students assist in editing Oral Tradition and two series of books. He has had, among others, NEH, ACLS, and Guggenheim fellowships. Research interests include sociolinguistics, language and gender, American dialectology, and language change. He is the author of articles on verse, meter, dialectology, and discourse analysis in books and journals such as Language, Style, Neophilologus, American Speech, and Empirical Studies of the Arts.