I was born in Calgary, Alberta,
Canada, and lived there
until 1994. During that time, I attended the University
of Calgary for six academic
years. I got a Bachelor of Science in Physics there in 1991 (with a
Linguistics minor), and after one year playing bass guitar around Calgary and
generally deciding on my destiny, I began graduate work in the Linguistics
department in 1992. I completed my MA in Linguistics in 1994 with a
thesis in phonetics, under the supervision of Michael Dobrovolsky.
I was accepted to the PhD program in the UCLA Linguistics
department, and moved to Los Angeles
in 1994 to begin my studies there. I wanted to learn phonetics and
mathematical linguistics, which was regarded as odd by the members of the
department. Indeed, the schedule of courses was not set up to
accommodate this particular combination of interests, and I took a year longer
than most students to complete the course work in my areas. I did
another MA thesis project as a preliminary to PhD work, and earned my MA in
Linguistics (again) in 1997. This phonetics thesis was completed
under the supervision of Peter Ladefoged.
In the meantime, I got married to Jacqueline in July 1996.
In Spring quarter of 1997,
Professors Michael Moortgat and Richard Oehrle came to UCLA to give a short course on a framework
for syntactic analysis that interested me greatly. They called it
"type-logical grammar," and afterward I knew I had to make it the
subject of my PhD dissertation. Ed Stabler
had also recently introduced me to the theory of learnability,
and showed me the dissertation of Makoto Kanazawa which proved a series of
results on the learnability of categorial
grammars. I felt there was a way of merging Kanazawa's
work with the type-logical framework by programming some software to
demonstrate an approach to the learning of type-logical grammars, and the basic
idea of my dissertation was formulated. I completed my dissertation
On the Logic and Learning of Language under the supervision of Ed Stabler, and was awarded the PhD in Linguistics in July of 1999
that year.
In the Fall of 1999, I began my
first teaching job, as a Full-time Lecturer with the Department of Linguistics
and Language Development at San José State
University. I was hired
to begin work on new program elements at the undergraduate and graduate level
in computational linguistics. In May 2000, however, I was offered
the chance to start a computational linguistics program at the University
of Chicago, and so naturally I took
the opportunity. I was appointed by the Linguistics department to
do some teaching and research in phonetics, and also
to work closely with the Computer Science department to begin new program
elements in computational linguistics. In the meantime, my daughter
Sandra was born in San José on April 25, 2000.
My four years at the University of Chicago
as Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistics, with an adjunct appointment in
Computer Science, were very formative. In that
time I managed to teach a wide variety of courses ranging from logic to speech
software, and I was also able to make a lot of progress on my research
programs. It was sad, however, to
realize that our efforts to introduce computational linguistics to the Computer
Science Professional Program were not supported by the program staff, and as a
result my position there was brought to a close. During that time I
endured, regrettably, the death of two colleagues, Prof. Kostas
Kazazis in December of 2001, and Prof. Karen Landahl in March of 2003. Karen in particular
worked to support my research efforts. With death there follows life, exemplified by the birth of my
second daughter Brenna in Chicago on May 25, 2003.
In the Fall
of 2004 I took a position as Lecturer in Linguistics at the California
State University,
Fresno. My family and I are all much more pleased
with the environment in Fresno than
we were in gritty Chicago. My job here has since changed, and I am now
Assistant Professor of Linguistics as of Fall
2005. I am working on developing our curriculum and research
profiles in phonetics, computational linguistics, and cognitive science.