Associate Professor
Academic Degrees
Paul D. Fallon, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, earned a Ph.D. (1998) and an M.A. from The Ohio State University, after receiving an M.S. and a B.S. in linguistics from Georgetown University. An abridged version of his dissertation, The Synchronic and Diachronic Phonology of Ejectives, was published by Routledge in 2002. An expert on the sound patterns of language, Dr. Fallon has published more than a dozen peer-reviewed articles or book chapters on a variety of languages (Greek, Georgian, Chechen, Blin, and others) in such publications as the proceedings of the World Congress of African Linguistics, the Annual Conference on African Linguistics, and the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, as well as the International Journal of the Humanities. He also has contributed several articles to Elsevier’s Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd Edition.
One of Dr. Fallon’s research projects involves linguistic fieldwork with speakers of the Blin language in Eritrea (Horn of Africa) and focuses on the interaction between the rhythm of the language and the word-building component of the grammar. Another involves the creation of a dictionary database of his fieldnotes. Dr. Fallon was awarded a research grant in 2004 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support his work on Blin oral narratives and grammar.
Dr. Fallon has been a peer reviewer for the National Science Foundation, acted as associate editor for The International Journal of the Humanities, and is on the advisory board of the Linguist List, the world’s largest online linguistic resource. He is a member of the Linguistic Society of America, the International Phonetic Association, the American Dialect Society, the Dictionary Society of North America, and Phi Beta Kappa.