Professor
jheath@umich.edu
Office Information:
Department of Linguistics
University of Michigan
418 Lorch Hall
611 Tappan Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1220
Language Documentation;
Historical Linguistics;
Morphology;
Linguistics;
Tenure-track
Education/Degree:
Ph.D. with distinction, 1976, University of Chicago
M.A. 1973
A.B. summa cum laude, Linguistics and Arabic, Harvard, 1971
About
Jeff Heath is a combined fieldwork and historical linguist. He has done fieldwork on Australian Aboriginal languages (1970's), Maghrebi Arabic (1980's), and since 1989 on languages of interior West Africa, especially Mali and southwest Burkina Faso. He is interested in rich morphology and its evolution, and in tonal and prosodic systems of African languages. See the Dogon site. For more information on his research, visit his homepage.
Grants
- 2013-17 National Science Foundation continuation grant, "Dogon and Bangime completion"
- 2011-12 Guggenheim fellowship
- 2006-9 National Science Foundation continuation grant, "Dogon languages of Mali"
- 2004-6 National Endowment for the Humanities grant, "Dogon languages of Mali"
- 2000-1 Fulbright research grant (Mali, Niger, Benin)
- 1999-2002 National Science Foundation & National Endowment for the Humanities, Tamashek (Tuareg) language of Mali
- 1995-97 National Endowment for the Humanities grant, Grammar-Text-Dictionaries of Songhay (Mali, West Africa)
- 1991-94 National Science Foundation Grant, Timbuktu-Djenne Songhay
- 1983-85 National Science Foundation Grant, Judeo-Arabic Dialects of Morocco
- 1982 National Science Foundation grant, Moroccan Arabic Phonology
- 1979-81 National Science Foundation Grant, Language Mixing in Moroccan Arabic
Field(s) of Study
- Morphology
- Prosody (tonosyntax, grammaticalized intonation)
- Cognitive linguistics, lexical semantics
- NW and W Africa (Dogon, Songhay, Tamashek, spoken Arabic)
- Historical Linguistics
- Rough Humor
