"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious" "The search for truth is more precious than its possession" "Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty" Albert Einstein What language is the one on the bottom?

Assistant Professor   Language and Linguistics Program Address:     Department of Anthropology   Brandeis University   204 Brown Hall   Waltham, MA  02454 Phone:   781-736-2225 E-mail: Office Hours:     Tuesday 3-4pm, or e-mail me for appointment Teaching now:     Ling 100: Introduction to Linguistics [course webpage]   Ling 130: Semantics: the structure of concepts [course webpage] PAST CLASSES          PAPERS & CONFERENCES          CV [pdf]       Dissertation: Semantics and pragmatics of arbitrariness.   [pdf] Paper-saving single-spaced version  [pdf] M.A. thesis in mathematics: Entropy as relevance: maximizing entropy and minimizing loss.  [pdf] Research interests formal semantics, formal pragmatics, discourse functions of syntax, syntax-semantics interface game-theoretical semantics; game-theoretic approaches to language mathematical properties of linguistic formalisms theoretical and psycholinguistic studies of semantics of impersonal constructions / impersonal pronouns sloppy identity in various domains null reference parallels between the nominal, temporal, modal, and verbal domains accommodation

I was born in the city of Kharkov, Ukraine (city map).       I know some Ukrainian, but my mother-tongue is Russian.       Together with my family, I moved to Brooklyn, New York in 1994.       After a couple of years of high school, I went to the University of       Pennsylvania for a B.A. in Linguistics and Math.       In the fall of 2001, I entered a Ph.D. programme in Linguistics at UPenn, graduating in 2006.       I also got an M.A. in Math.   Somewhere along the line I encountered tango, and Robert, sine qua non.    My friend Vita Markman is a linguist and tanguera on the West Coast: here is her webpage, and may it be noted by the search engines.

My poetry in Russian Photo gallery Hobbies &c.