Peter Cole' picturePeter Cole

Contacting me

Mail

Email

Phone

Fax

Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science
University of Delaware
42 East Delaware Avenue
Newark DE 19716

pcole@udel.edu

(302) 831-6829

(302) 831-6896




Education

Research Interests

The overriding goal of contemporary linguistics is to determine the range of variation possible in human languages. The studies I have engaged in involve the comparison of syntactic constructions in several languages and/or dialects in order to determine what possibilities can exist in human language. This general approach has become known among Generative Grammarians as "comparative syntax", but it is also closely akin to linguistic typology.

Soon after getting my Ph.D. I spent a number of years concentrating on contemporary Hebrew. Later, I became interested in the Quechua languages (spoken in the Andean mountains of South America). While I have never lost interest in these languages, in recent years most of my work has been on Austronesian languages, especially Malay/Indonesian, Toba Batak and Javanese.

Additional Affiliation

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Department of Linguistics   
Deutscher Platz 6
04103 Leipzig

Symposia and Workshops

Together with David Gil and Uri Tadmor, I have been a member of the coordinating committee of ISMIL, the annual International Symposium on Malay/Indonesian Linguistics.

Typological Tools for Field Linguistics

This website contains tools for use in field linguistics and language description. Most of the items on the website are questionnaires designed to assist in eliciting data in such a fashion that the data will be comparable across languages. The idea behind the website is that field linguistics should be typologically informed and that the results of field work should be of typological interest. The questionnaires and other tools presented there help the field linguist understand what questions might be of typological (and theoretical) interest and guide the linguist in both eliciting data and extracting information from naturalistic texts. In addition, the site would like to include "elicitation kits", allowing the researcher to present movie clips and similar language stimuli to native speaker consultants to see how they would describe the event shown. The number of elicitation kits available is still very limited, but we hope that more will be available in the future. Information is also included on books and articles that provide down-to-earth guidance to the field linguist.

The site is edited by Peter Cole (MPI EVA and the University of Delaware) and Jeff Good (SUNY Buffalo), and the webpage coordinator is Claudia Schmidt (MPI EVA).

Some Recent and Not So Recent Papers

Link to Papers Available for Downloading

Recent Books and Editorships:

Recent Articles and Papers:


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Copyright (c) Peter Cole, 1995.
Last Updated: February 14, 2006.
URL of this document: http://www.udel.edu/pcole/.