In 1969, my father was posted to Ouagadougou in what is now Burkina Faso but was then known as Upper Volta. During the following two years, i only saw my immediate family twice: during a visit to them in Africa at Christmastime, 1969-70, and during a few weeks' traveling about Northwestern Europe in August 1970.
When i went off to Mercersburg i expected to make a career in the `sciences', but while there i developed a fascination with the field of `classical', a.k.a. Western `art' music, including opera. My familiarity with Italian derives ultimately from this period, and my interest in comparative Romance linguistics in turn derives to a great extent ultimately from my consequent awareness of and intrigue at the differences between Italian and French. Unfortunately, the operatic connection has its natural affect on my command of the Italian language: while i have a pretty good passive facility with modern Standard Italian, my active knowledge tends toward the overly formal/archaic traditional stage language.
While at Kenyon i began to be seriously interested in the work of J. R. R. Tolkien. On the basis of his example, among other things i began to play around with invented languages. It also made me aware, for the first time, of the existance of an academic discipline `linguistics' that might hold some interest for me.
As a music student, although i was primarily interested in composition, my parents and others convinced me that i would do better economically if i got an advanced degree in musicology and pursued a career in either academia or music criticism. During my senior year in college i began to develop a strong interest in the nationalist movements in music in 19th-century Eastern Europe, especially Russia. I went off to graduate school with the intention of pursuing research in this area. In the process, of course, i began to acquaint myself with Russian and, to a lesser extent, the other major Slavic languages.
After spending a couple of years at the Univ. of Pennsylvania and writing an analytical thesis on Alexandr Borodin's Prince Igor, i transfered to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This was due in large part to the maturation of my interest in Eastern-European national and, hence, folk music. There was nobody at UPenn. who could really supervise studies in this area, whereas UIUC has some big guns in ethnomusicology and a major ethnomusicological archive.
So i came to east-central Illinois, where i have lived now for 20 years. Oddly enough, my original reason for coming here evaporated pretty quickly, at least for me. While at the Univ. of Penn. i had already begun to entertain doubts as to my ability to fit into the discipline of musicology, and my experiences during my first year at UIUC tended to confirm these doubts. Whereas what i mostly wanted to do was musical analysis, i found myself surrounded mostly by people, both faculty and fellow grad students, whose interests were more or less paleographical -- examining manuscripts, tracing the transmission history of a piece of music through a series of manuscripts, often paying very little attention to the music itself. During my first year at UIUC i had a teaching assistantship, teaching music appreciation courses. I did quite well at this, and my assistantship might have gotten renewed if i hadn't been becoming increasingly disenchanted with the discipline and begun communicating in various ways that i wanted to get out of it.
I didn't at this point completely give up the notion of a career in music. For a while i went back to what had always been of greater interest to me, composition. I attached myself to a member of the composition faculty at UIUC, Ben Johnston, who was willing to supervise my work and was able to critique it in a constructive and fruitful manner. At one point i went to a certain amount of trouble trying to enter the graduate program in music composition at UIUC. This effort bore very little success (approximately none at all); again, the problem was dissonance (pun intended) between my goals and interests and those of most of the department faculty. And this in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- my awareness of things going on in 20th-century music that others seemed never to have noticed, and my having a very clearly thought-out aesthetic philosophy.
I managed to find one other composition professor who was able to sympathize with what i was trying to do musically and to critique it helpfully without trying to impose his own aesthetic views on me. But that made only two such people out of a faculty of over a dozen, and both of them were rather advanced in age -- indeed, they both retired a few years later. While i managed to accomplish a fair amount of what i felt was good work during this time (roughly 1978-1983), it came to fairly little in the end.
Perhaps if i had been older, or at any rate a bit more mature, i would have had the strength of character to insist on doing what i wanted to do in spite of what was `PC' in the discipline as a whole; God knows i've been a bit of a maverick in pursuing my own interests in linguistics. From time to time since the late '70s i have said that i ought perhaps not to have gone directly into graduate school after graduating from college.
In the meantime, i had begun studying Sanskrit. I chose to pursue these studies for two primary reasons:
I toyed with a notion of doing research on languages invented for the purposes of fiction, as Tolkien had invented several for his Middle Earth, but although that subject continues to interest me it was easy for me to conclude that there wasn't enough real scholarly meat in it.
I very quickly became intrigued with questions of syntactic theory, and, discovering that there were several competing frameworks of syntactic theory and some question as to which might prove most valuable with regard to descriptive and explanatory adequacy, i began wondering, early in 1984, which framework would be most useful for describing the free constituent-order phenomena that intrigued me in languages such as Sanskrit. In March it struck me that this question might make a good topic for dissertation research. As it happened, the very day after this idea occurred to me i encountered my advisor, Hans Henrich Hock, in the lobby of the University Library and bounced it off him. He very quickly became quite enthusiastic about it, and for an hour and a half we animatedly discussed ways and means of pursuing such a project. By the end of this conversation we had agreed that i would, under his supervision, examine the corpus of Vedic Sanskrit to get some idea of exactly what could and could not be done in that language with regard to constituent-order freedom, and consider how the resulting generalizations might be described in each of a number of frameworks.
With regard to the corpus, i kind of worked in anti-chronological order, starting with the (prose) Upanishads and working back ultimately to the Rg-Veda. With regard to frameworks i started out looking at four: GPSG, LFG, REST, and RG. But i very quickly convinced myself that RG, while i love it dearly, has little to say about constituent order; and in 1987-88 i wrote a paper that demonstrated that a GPSG treatment of certain Vedic syntactic phenomena was necessarily excessively cumbersome -- needlessly so, given that much of what was expressible in the GPSG analysis was equally well expressed in LFG. So in its final form, my dissertation compared only REST and LFG accounts, the LFG one turning out to be more successful. I worried at the time, and still sometimes worry, that this conclusion may have been influenced by my own bias, though Hans would tell me, `Maybe, but it may also be correct!'
In completion of my master's degree, i took the departmental comprehensive exams in late January-early February 1985, getting `high passes' in syntactic theory, historical linguistics, and Romance linguistics (obliging me to buy three pitchers of beer at Treno's the Friday after the results were posted) and a simple pass in phonology. A little over a year later i took the preliminary exam for the doctorate, essentially a combined essay and viva voce explication and defense of my proposed research project before a faculty committee consisting of people who might possibly be on my final thesis committee. As i remember it, after i had finished talking and fielding questions i was evicted from the conference room and, in about a minute and a half -- barely time for me to get myself a cup of tea -- the committee had decided to approve my proposal.
Over the next four years i plugged away at my work, in the process becoming familiar with both the Apple Macintosh (my advisor being a devoted aficionado of that brand of computer) and the word-processor Microsoft Word. Sometime in the first half of 1990 i completed the draft of my dissertation and circulated it to my committee: Profs. Hans Henrich Hock, Alice Davison, Georgia M. Green, Jerry Morgan, and Raheshwari Pandharipande.
After a certain amount of schedule-juggling, i defended my dissertation in late June 1990. This time, i didn't even have time to get myself a cup of tea before my committee had voted to accept my dissertation and grant me the doctorate. The fruits of choosing one's thesis committee members intelligently and maintaining dialogue with each of them. In addition to working hard and well, of course. I worked through the summer and fall of 1990 revising my dissertation and finally deposited it in late November. So technically that's when i completed all the requirements for the Ph.D., and my dissertation officially bears the date 1990, although my official degree date is January 1991, that being the earliest graduation date on the UIUC calendar after the end of summer.