David Goldstein

David Goldstein is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Indo-European Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Classical Greek Syntax: Wackernagel’s Law in Herodotus (Brill 2016) and numerous articles that span Classics, lexicography, linguistics, and phylogenetics. The focus of his research is the relationship between language change, in particular syntactic and semantic change, and linguistic theory. What role does linguistic change have to play in a theory of natural language? And how can linguistic theory help us understand the mechanisms and motivations for diachronic change? In answering these questions, his work draws on tools from an array of fields including corpus linguistics, Bayesian statistics, and evolutionary biology. As a Guggenheim Fellow, he will investigate the ways in which sequences of linguistic changes result in typological correlations. His research has also been supported by fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the Society for Classical Studies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Photo Credit: Abigail Raminsky