Peter Cole' picturePeter Cole

Contacting me

Mail

Contact Information

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

Secondary affiliation:
Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Inselstrasse 22
D-04103 Leipzig, Germany

Email: pcole@udel.edu

Phone: (302) 831-6829

Fax: (302) 831-6896



Positions

Education

Research Interests

The studies I have engage in involve the comparison of syntactic constructions in several dialects or languages with the overall goal of delimiting the range of possibilities that can exist in human language.  The longterm goal is to determine what theory of language best predicts the rangew of possibilities. This general approach has become known as "comparative syntax".

MY work has spanned a number of languages.  Soon after getting my Ph.D. I spent several 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, over the last ten years I have mostly worked on South East Asian languages, among them varieties of Malay Indonesian, Chinese, Toba Batak and Javanese.

The topic of my dissertation was pronouns, but I have worked on a wide variety of subjects. I am currently especially interested in voice in the Austronesian languages. In addition to syntax per se, I have written papers on semantics and pragmatics, and I am very interested in how the scientific study of language can contribute to cognitive science in general. During the last several years I have been involved in a long-term study of the acquisition of Indonesian by children in Jakarta and and a cross-dialectal study of Indonesian dialects, both in collaboration with Gabriella Hermon, Uri Tadmor and David Gil,  under the auspices of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany). My most recent project is a study of Jambi Malay, an NSF-sponsored project carried out in collaboration with Gabriella Hermon and Uri Tadmor, Co-PIs.

Typological Tools for Field Linguistics

I maintain this website together with Jeff Good of the Department of Linguistics of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.  The site provides a listing of linguistic questionnaires, stimulus kits and other tools for field linguistics and language description. The website is a contribution of the Department of Linguistics of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology to the Language Typology Resource Center. Please send suggestions for the website to Peter Cole <pcole@udel.edu>.

Some Recent Symposia and Workshops

Some Publications

Papers Available for Downloading contains links to those of the papers below which are available for downloading. In some cases these are prefinal versions.

Selected Recent Publications

 Selected Earlier Publications


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Copyright (c) Peter Cole, 1995, 2001.
Last Updated: Feb. 28, 2006.
URL of this document: http://www.ling.udel.edu/pcole/cole.html.