I was born in Washington, DC in 1953 and was chased out almost immediately by
the incoming administration. I was raised in Southern California, where my main hobbies
were reading and hiding from the sun. I attended UCLA for a long, long time, studying linguistics as an undergraduate
(1974 BA) and later a graduate student (1975 MA;
1980 PhD).
My primary research interests have been in syntax and the syntactic and morphological structure of languages typologically very dissimilar from English (languages including native American languages like Maricopa, Yavapai, Chickasaw).
I have been at WSU since 1981. I am the coordinator of the Linguistics program at WSU and I teach all the linguistics courses in the English Department: syntax, phonology, language acquisition, and sociolinguistics, as well as the traditional grammar course(s) and history of English.Occasionally I teach seminars in linguistic topics like discourse and language families in which I have a research interest (Yuman, Celtic). Together with the ESL specialist, Elizabeth Siler, I supervise the ESL classes given by the English Department.