Linguist Matthew Dryer Receives Prestigious Humboldt Research Award

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Matthew S. Dryer, Ph.D., of Amherst, professor in the Department of Linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Buffalo, has received a prestigious Humboldt Research Award from Germany's Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which each year honors renowned scientists and scholars from abroad.

The $81,000 award is based on the scholar's entire academic record and awardees are invited to conduct an original research project of his or her own design, in close collaboration with an appropriate colleague in Germany, over a period of six to 12 months.

The award will permit Dryer to continue his work with Martin Haspelmath and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig on a world-wide database of language structures. Haspelmath, a professor and senior linguistic scientist at the institute, received his master's degree in linguistics from UB in 1988.

Dryer's primary research interests are in typology, syntax and language documentation, and he is, along with Haspelmath, one of four co-editors of the World Atlas of Language Structures, a typological atlas published by Oxford University Press in 2005.

The theoretical orientation of his work is that of basic linguistic theory. Since 1983 he has been working on a project whose aim is to establish a large cross-linguistic database on word order and related typological characteristics, and he has produced a number of publications in this area.

Dryer's language documentation interests include Kutenai and Papuan languages.

Dryer has held visiting positions at UCLA, the University of Oregon, The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

His many publications include "Primary Objects, Secondary Objects and Antidative" (Language, 1986), "The Greenbergian Word Order Correlations" (Language, 1992), "The Discourse Function of the Kutenai Inverse" (Voice and Inversion, 1994), "Focus, Pragmatic Presupposition, and Activated Propositions" (Journal of Pragmatics, 1996) and "On the 6-way Word Order Typology" (Studies in Language, 1997).

Dryer has been a member of the UB faculty since 1989.

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, a flagship institution in the State University of New York system and its largest and most comprehensive campus. UB's more than 28,000 students pursue their academic interests through more than 300 undergraduate, graduate and professional degree programs. Founded in 1846, the University at Buffalo is a member of the Association of American Universities.