Doug Ball

Contact Information

Research Interests

• Language groups
  • Austronesian languages, especially Polynesian languages (e.g. Tongan)
  • Native American languages (e.g. Wichita)
• Morphosyntax/semantics
  • Morphology-syntax interface issues
    (word vs. morph; accounting for syntactic facts given a particular morphological status)
  • Phrase Structure (tree geometry and constituency), especially in verb-initial languages
  • Argument realization and argument alternations
• Morphology/phonology
  • Morphological structure and its relationship to phonology
  • Consonant alternations
• Historical linguistics
  • Diachronic aspects of the above
• Hobby research interests (if that's possible)
  • Constructed languages (my own and others)
  • Sociology of the field

For the full story, see my CV (pdf). Please feel free to ask for copies of any papers or handouts.

Current Projects

• My dissertation, which is on Tongan and is tentatively titled Clause Structure and Argument Realization in Tongan. It includes work on the following empirical domains within Tongan:

  • Clausal Constituency and Order

  • The Subject "Clitics"

  • Case-Marking, especially with respect to "middle" clauses

  • Noun Incorporation

  • The Instrumental Word ‘aki

  For more information, see the handout (pdf) from my dissertation proposal talk

Publications and Other Papers

Biographical Information

Education

Other Interests

• Conlanging — the hobby of inventing languages
• Music — composing, playing, listening
  • I am also the leader of one of the two departmental bands, Creole Formation.

  See my other web presence for more information about my conlanging and musical interests.

• Sports
• Science Fiction

Links

• Other members of my cohort on the web:
  
  • Lauren Hall-Lew
  • Dmitry Levinson
  • Elisabeth Norcliffe
  • Neal Snider
  • Rebecca Starr
• Other Stanford Linguistics Grad Students (past and present)
  • John Beavers (UT-Austin)
  • Itamar Francez (Yale)
  • Andrew Koontz-Garboden (University of Manchester, UK)
  • The Present Lineup of Stanford Grad Students
• Other Friends and Family in Academia (and on the web)
  • My uncle (Civil Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
  • University of Rochester Linguistics Department
  • David Rood (Linguistics, CU-Boulder)
  • Sarah Higley (English, University of Rochester)
  • Dave Morris (English, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
  • Ian Quinn (Music, Yale)
• For Fun
  • DenverPost.com Arcade (now filled with tons of games)
  • Klingon Number Game
  • Wikipedia
  • Star Wars.com
  • Fight Spam! Click Here!