1 | Name: | Dr. Brian Joseph | |
Institution: | Ohio State University | ||
Year Elected: | 2019 | ||
Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | ||
Residency: | Resident | ||
Living? : | Living | ||
Birth Date: | 1951 | ||
Brian Daniel Joseph is currently Distinguished University Professor, Kenneth E. Naylor Professor of Slavic Languages and Linguistics, Professor of Linguistics, at the Ohio State University. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1978 before beginning his career at Ohio State. Brian Joseph’s illuminating introductory paper from our Spring 2017 meeting (now published in Proceedings 162, 1) synthesized the issues in reconciling the linguistic and DNA-derived evidence of the peopling of Europe with languages of the Indo-European family. His own prodigious research and publication as an Indo-Europeanist and Balkanologist has centered on the prehistory and history of Greek over its 3500 years and its complex, now millennium-old relations to languages of the other families of the region, principally Albanian, South Slavic, and Turkish. Bringing to this work a profound mastery of contemporary morphological and syntactic theory, his scholarship has decisively rejuvenated linguists’ sense of the unique internal coherence of language as a grammatical structure, yet one ever adapting to the sometimes complex, multilingual social conditions that sustain it. He is the defining master in his generation of theoretically informed historical linguistics. Author or co-author of over 250 substantial journal articles and book chapters, of seven published books and 19 edited volumes or special journal issues, Joseph has also served the entire field of linguistics as editor of its flagship journal, Language. He is the author of: The Synchrony and Diachrony of the Balkan Infinitive: A Study in Areal, General, and Historical Linguistics, 1983 (reprint 2009); Morphology and Universals in Syntactic Change: Evidence from Medieval and Modern Greek, 1990; (with H. Hock) Language Change, Language History, and Language Relationship: An Introduction to Historical Linguistics, 1996; The Modern Greek Weak Subject Pronoun τος, 2015; (with P. Pappas) Modern Greek – A Grammatical Sketch, 2016; (with V. Friedman) The Balkan Languages, 2018. He has edited: (with P. Postal) Studies in Relational Grammar 3, 1990; (with R. Janda) Handbook of Historical Linguistics, 2003; (with A. Ralli, M. Janse) Studies in Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistic Theory, 2011. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2004), American Association for the Advancement of Science (2007), Linguistic Society of America (2010) (vice-president/president-elect, 2018). Brian Joseph was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. |