Adam Cooper

My overarching research interests lie in bringing to light the mutually-reinforcing insights of two all too frequently disassociated subfields of language study, historical linguistics and theoretical phonology. I maintain that such insights can be revealed in a dialogue that involves, on the one hand, evaluating data from ancient languages from a fresh and theoretically contemporary perspective, and on the other, considering the extent to which phenomena exemplified in those data require us to reconsider our theoretical assumptions. Most recently I have seen the fruits of this approach borne out in an evaluation of syllable structure and syllabification in Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed parent language of the Indo-European language family. My ongoing work in this domain seeks to expand our understanding of the distribution of complex and non-canonical syllable structures, such as syllabic consonants, within and across languages.

I teach Introduction to Linguistics and The Sounds of Language (an introduction to phonetics and phonology). I've also taught courses on historical linguistics and writing systems.

I have presented my work in a number of venues, including annual meetings of the Linguistic Society of America (of which I am a member), the North East Linguistic Society, and the East Coast Indo-European Conference.