My research and teaching have been centered on the connections between rhetoric (discourse) and grammar (linguistic structure). I have recently published a book, Grammaticalization (Cambridge 1993, co-authored with Elizabeth Traugott), and am currently working on a reconsideration of the notion of event, that is, how people report what has happened, focusing on the language of vernacular, i.e. popular written and spoken, narrative. I'm also interested in comparative Indo-European and in the Malayo-Polynesian languages, and have published articles and written and edited books on Indo-European and Germanic philology and on Malay discourse. I am editor of the journal Language Sciences, I serve on the executive committee of the MLA's Language Theory section, and have served on the executive committee of the Linguistic Society of America. I've been the Collitz Professor at the LSA's Linguistics Institute, and have been a Fulbright Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow.